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 |   All that remains: here in my afterlife as a 'mainstream' blogger, with what little I know. |
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The Idiotic Ideate?? Formerly: New Zenith To Hell…(all started with arc as writer here from the trials of Rising Stars to Preferred Author to WDC Quills Best Poetry Collection to the falling action I feel now that settles in a white case.) Got to hustle to preserve the best of me before fully fading on that virtual horizon glowing more brilliant with each passing day to permanent nuclear winter. if people don’t get it, I don’t need to explain it. We kill all that’s beautiful before we question it’s purpose. So many people find it easier to think in the black and the white. God forbid you get lost straying in the gray. "Whoever fights monsters should see to it…he does not become a monster.” I’ve been to the abyss and back. Not so bad. The loneliest happy person you'd ever meet, when not the saddest person who needs to be alone. In an ever-changing world, we need to handle topics at the ready. If you roll over and give in to the narrative without lending a voice of your own, you might as well hand over your civil liberties. We have voices that should connect to true conscience and spirit for honest and open discourse. Why feel so redacted? Unify on issues and put drama aside. Open minds require complete objectivity. If none need apply, question the unbendable sources for answer. If you knee-jerk react to every issue lurking out there that clutches your neck, you fall victim to your own ignorance born from a life of apathy (no doubt) in pathetic cries of injustice. Just writing what I feel without the narrative-altering mind f---ing with my head. [MY Chorus] In your house, I long to be Room by room, patiently I'll wait for you there, like a stone I'll wait for you there, alone "It amazed me how truth was often suffocated in minutes, but lies were given sufficient air to breathe indefinitely." "You are all better than you think you are, you are just designed not to believe it when you hear it from yourself." ![Merit Badge in Second Time Around Contest
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Congratulations on winning the Grand Overall Prize in [Link To Item #2164876] with your beautiful poem, [Link to Book Entry #933358]. This poem really moved me. Great writing!
Rachel *^*Heartv*^*](https://images.Writing.Com/imgs/writing.com/writers/badges/group-Second_Time_Around_Contest-2164963_14.gif)    "...lasting art is never anything more than a mathematical expression of the relations that exist between the internal and the external, the self [le moi] and the world." -Jean Metzinger I'm in love with carefully chosen words, arranged just so, audible, edible, to inhale. I attempt to post new poems and epiphanies daily with some links to what inspires. I am legally blind with a rare, genetic form of glaucoma. I'm described as "end stage" after two successful surgeries, still subject to further vision loss. Cataracts complicating matters. Writing Can get strenuous but seldom deters what yearns to emerge, despite a documented history of depression and recently diagnosed ADHD and undefinable social disorders and/or PTSD. My recent poetry:
Sometimes epiphanies about my insights on writing and life and what goes on... Making sense of life is maddening. Why do I need to know, when truth may not actually exist? Learning to accept would be a better pursuit? Flailing about in my own mediocrity, hoping to bust out. I am visible. You can put a face with a name. I would like to see other writers, too. Fiction is what you write, not who you are. Reinventing myself. I couldn't continue on the path I was on and needed a fresh start. This time around I want to put the focus on writing and the world outside of this community as it affects my life. I realize now that I have been baring my chest a bit more, as when young. fake me much more boring and unliberated than the real me. A world arriving as silent as that blossom in your garden that I told you about... |
| I finally did it. The thing I should be doing and should have been doing all along is right in front of me. I've started to mingle with that novel, the one that has been so closely associated with my life as a journalist. I think 30 years is long enough. When rereading what I wrote, I realized that I thought my story was too dull to come across to a reader's audience. I was wrong. In recounting the events to my physical therapist the other day, I realized I had more than one nemesis, struggled in the university atmosphere and at a public radio station because of this PC culture I had never been exposed to before, the fact that (lead buried?) I had been the victim of not one but two sexual predators (and maybe more) who used their position to manipulate me, and a love interest that would not be. It's been so personal and real that the biggest part of the story that I discount is that I had glaucoma. The pressure of being at college and my abuse of alcohol created an even worse scenario. I had to buckle down and keep my personal and public life under control while I went through discouraging encounters with doctors and two surgeries. I also managed to be a full-time student holding down two part time jobs while attempting a social life that included pursuit of a girl introduced to me by my backstabbing roommate who threatened me because he and her were 'mentally ill' (he ironically a victim of sexual abuse by his father: claimed) that I think he was using to get closer to her. However, he was jealous of me and her apparent attraction to me. But, through some guise I couldn't see, he managed to lower me in her eyes, though I suspect that didn't matter. She would have an incident with police that landed her in jail and set her off on a journey that seemed to force us into a platonic association. Maybe, it's because after one night out at the bar I wrote on a slip of paper for her to see my actual desire for her. It was never discussed. But, it was pointed out at one point why we could only be friends, because she didn't want to lose what we had. It could have been out of respect for her friend, my roommate. It could have been that I was truly the mentally ill one, though I thought I hid it pretty well. Ironically, I was the sanest when I was with her. Which gets me to the next thought I had when revisiting this. Does one try to make fiction out of a real story, or just make it an autobiographical piece. Do I use fiction (definitely for dialogue) to glue together a story that I cannot imagine without embellishing to flesh it out. Maybe, as it develops, be able to recall events. Perhaps, the whole novel could be about a search to understand what happened in the early 90s. Why I walked away from that life and never looked back, because it burned me out, failed me, and I failed it...by my own ignorance of how to handle it. I have regrets. That is essentially the motivation for going back. Here's what I wrote as a new introduction (very rough): The song Slow Burn might best describe my life at the end of 1989 on varied levels. It's a story that could begin in so many places (and still does when brought up in reflection/flashbacks) and could end just as quickly. It’s taken me nearly thirty years to weave together journals and fictional attempts to account for the years that brought about a mental awakening. This new sobriety in '89 was aided by what was coined as negative capability, which I had been learning to apply and eventually deplete. My use of telephones would become one casualty, oddly (a phobia?). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_phobia#:~:text=Telephone%20phobia%20 Like any story with a prequel, it really all began in 1984 when I was recruited by a community college after I responded to an ad for a seminar in town on writing careers and more. I was sold on getting paid while working for credit at a local newspaper. Though the Daily News shot me down, a local shopper grabbed me up. The fuel was provided to show my rejecters what they were missing, as I started a misguided journey to prove my talent as a writer. After five and a half years and a fine arts degree, with two and a half years spent chasing news stories as a broadcast journalist for a local radio station, I was staring at a huge change for my life: an attempt at a four-year degree while a student news associate at the university Public Radio affiliate in Marquette. Many will remember and fictionalize my journey differently than I account, because I was not stronger than the narrative that would be applied to me for the two years it took me to get in the door and then rush out like it was some turnstile at the end of 1992. I was naïve and didn’t realize people I encountered didn’t play fair. I had many failed relationships before washing the slate clean in December of 1989, and it included demolishing my car on New Year's eve, right after getting affairs squared away in Marquette. Though, this story is not a religious journey, it was after a plea to god to help me that I rolled my car after a night in my hometown to celebrate. I didn’t give Him as much credit as deserved for that auspicious start to the next two years, even after climbing out of an overturned Oldsmobile at the bottom of a ravine. It rolled several times on the way down. I was not wearing a seatbelt. I used my arms and legs to brace myself inside the cabin all the way down in that machine. I walked away with a gimpy ankle that clicked in cold weather for, ironically, the next two years. I had been sleepy, I guess, the moment the car gained speed climbing that hill from the club a quarter mile away with only two miles to drive. It made no sense as the car climbed that it would cross over the centerline, which I could vividly remember for years. After cutting the wheel, the Cutlass Calais with the Quad-Four engine seemed to slide across the 'cut off road' toward a guard rail at the top that would inevitably be sheared off. Steering out of the car’s new direction on that fateful night (do I believe in fate and destiny?), it seemed to steer and propel itself, as if it had stepped on a bar of soap in a wet shower. To this day, I believe I may have been drowsy but not drunk in my weakened state after a few drinks following an exhausting evening of basketball. I could not imagine it was enough to cause me to send the wrecked car awry. What I was ticketed for, I don’t recall, but it wasn’t drunk driving. I wondered if my days communicating with the local sheriff in my capacity as a news reporter helped change the outcome. I don’t recall anything more than a sobriety test, which was simply counting backwards from 100. And when it was time to meet with a claims adjuster, my prayer was answered. I had money for college. I was able to pay off my auto loan and put an extra $2500 toward my living expenses and education, until I earned enough to get me through the next two years. It wouldn’t stop there. I took a second radio job part-time while earning 16-20 credits per semester. I didn’t have to take that many classes, but I was about to become an overachiever who would pull down three state broadcasting awards. I was Mr. Serious to other student interns at the PBS bunker where we gathered. They tried to get me to integrate and loosen up. I could have become the next director of that radio station by the summer of '92, but I did not want to be part of that atmosphere anymore. When I denied the station manager’s request to oblige his request to seek the position, he turned on me. It got colder and even more divisive. Little did I know that he would become (and had been) a sexual predator who used his position to get close to guys like me. Young, attractive men he could keep under his thumb. That's as far as I want to go with the current synopsis. |
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In the Falkland Islands, internet is very limited and very expensive. The place I'm currently staying only lets me use it in the middle of the night, so when I have to get up at 3 am to check my texts (no cell service to the US here unless I'm on the internet) or WdC, I don't do nearly as much as I used to. 
I currently have 2 very long emails I still need to get to from several days ago. Anyway, I miss everyone, but I also miss sleep, so there's that. 
Have you spoken to the doctor about your vision problems lately? I know there are special glasses for it because I have to wear them to read much ever since the brain injury. It's part of why I now only listen to audiobooks instead of reading regular books. It took 8 years for anyone to diagnose it because I have a brain injury and while one might think it would be obvious to me that I see double, it wasn't. Partly, my brain does a fair job of compensating. But also, partly, you use your brain to realize and understand that the 2 images you constantly see are double vision and something you should mention to your eye doctor. Since my brain was damaged, even basic things like that can escape me. 
I never once thought to mention it, even with annual eye exams in the Army and an exam every 2 years at the VA. Though, in my defense, since it happens in something like 41% of people with a brain injury, it should have been discovered by an eye doctor much sooner. 
I know doing that activity is a CRAP TON of work. But you made a difference in lives, not just his, but for all the people he's reviewed since. 
Well done! 
