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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... |
| PROMPT 5: Sept 5 – Do writers have obligations towards their readers? If so, what can they be? If not, why not? Do you have anything to tell about (your) readers? On Writers and Readers. No. What are the readers obligations to me as a writer, I offer rhetorically? No, a writer such as myself has no debt to readers. A paid writer has obligations to publishers and editors, if under a contract. A writer might feel indebted if he or she has fans. But, we write for ourselves. What motivates a person to write might actually determines the level of obligation one might feel. The obligation is to oneself and those who depend on them, like family, to provide a sustainable living. If a writer makes promises, there is a moral obligation in some rare instances. But, still no. Why we become writers is this impulse to put down words and craft them in a fashion similar to puzzling. We are creating as artists, although there are grant writers, educational requirements for theses or essays, and tabloid matter, including columns and other print criteria. I won’t speak to social media, basically brainwashing and rewriting history, social, moral and ethical values. No. We are fully going to focus on the struggling, starving profession called writing. I'm not going to look at the world through Elizabeth Gibson's lens. I write for me and aim to find a niche, to find some avenue of discovery. But, I can't think about getting paid for this. It's not nearly to that horizon. Ah, but there might be an obligation in the process to being discovered. Why would anyone care to read us? First, you have to be in the stream where you could be found and your words can be shared. Grr, social media.  How's that going to happen unless you tirelessly self-promote? When that process begins, it creates expectations. ‘Who want to read me?’ is the call. The response might be ‘we like what we so far. Show us what you've got’. Sort of an obligation there. You start mingling with readers and writers and there's the back and forth. You shout them out, the do the same. It’s a lot of work and you realize creativity has been stunted. When is that next Gibson creation coming? I don't know. Don't care. She got paid. She created those obligations. I'm Joe Schmo sitting over here in my incipient void on the internet, hunkered down between atoms of programming matter wondering what I'm doing in this tiny space I've occupied. I made $15? On my first digital book of poetry? On Amazon. Wasn't really pushing it or trying to be a household name. It's just something cool I could do. Now, I'm sitting here as a two-time Quill award winner of Best Poetry Collection (2020 and 2021). I'm dead in the water. There won't be anything beyond. Charitable? An honor. It's really more of a Gibson moment. But for me, resignation. So, while I'll park my butt this fall under a tree in a sunny patch an inhale nature connecting to my soul, I won't be thinking while jotting down words who's expecting this man to hop on the internet and post these ditties. I'm purging, I'm learning about life. I'm inside my head, pinging off my soul and heart, sending signals back to my brain, stimulated to conjur up word pictures and lonely lectures on the life of a solemn poet. No manuscript for a novel is forthcoming. No inklings of writing a short story for a site sponsored contest because I don’t get a sniff. Just an endless stream of "Poetic Referendum(s) On Life"  filling a book nearing it's end. Obligation to continue my membership is ending, too. Perhaps, a big send off in one to three years, when I drop all remaining coin collected, close account, forget writing and take up fishing. I'll stop puzzling words in my brain and sing aloud, dance with my wife in the kitchen, weed the garden beds and plant fresh bulbs, have summer cookouts, card games with friends, and keep hinting my kids need to grow up and move out — because a woman needs all of my attention. The true obligation would be her. She's not asking for a poem and a flower on her pillow, but my strong arms around her waist, a gleam in my eye as to happily spin her round and round until the bomb drops.No. Life is my obligation. PS -- I would gladly consent to becoming a white case here and leave all my gifts to this community. I'm not sure the obligation. It's given me SO much. But, say I'm dead and my family wants to take all my work and have a publisher create collections post part 'em? They get first crack. I'm sure I'll fade into obscurity like all the rest. Pack up all my belongings and turn the light out here before I'm white in my casket. It feels like I'm in it now. I reiterate: I've been give SO much. I also GAVE a lot — my words, my content, my support at times, when I could. Can you imagine writing over 3,000 reviews (5k plus from deletions) the length of high school to college essays and the best you could average was maybe 10-25 cents per review? There was definitely an impulse for many years of obligation, vague as it was, to fit in. I'm grateful for my status that arrived 14 years post. Honestly, I cherish it. I think it creates further obligation, so I upped my game. But, with mental affliction, learning disability, childhood PTSD, lingering and uncurable blindness, apnea, social awkwardness and more, you just want to get through one day without tearing the lid off something. Anger is better than self-pity. I grind. I wear out. I write. I purge. Obligation? Obligation?? We're talking about obligation??? I want mother's arms to wrap me up in my weakest moments, assurance. I want to protect my family from carpetbaggers and all the evil of the world. I have to save every last dime to make sure they are provided for when I'm gone. Maybe, that will include these unexamined words. This unmentored writing life where I struggle to co-exist. Where I wish I could tap one person on the shoulder and ask, is there any hope for me? And like some all knowing God, they can say 'give it up, kid.' You'll only get a headache. Just, no. No. Elizabeth Gibson owes me an explanation. 9.5.22 |
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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! 
