From my Pain Diary

8-14-10:
This morning, woke at 7am (7 hrs sleep). Usual back stiffness that improves with upright and mobility.
Sitting ok.
Drank iced tea instead of coffee.
Watered the back yard, scooped poop. Wore sandals.
Sat at my desk for a bit.
Put hose on trickle to water front trees. Barefoot.
Sat on the couch for a bit, ate a bowl of cereal. Knitting a dish cloth.
Started hanging up clothes in bedroom, walking back and forth to hamper.
Sat at computer again for a bit.
Hip joint pain started twinging.
Now feet and ankles swelling, and achy.
Back is starting to spasm.

WHY?!?! What is so maddening about all this is that it makes no sense at all? Moving a lot makes me hurt (afterward); moving a little makes me hurt (immediately after); sleeping too little makes me hurt; sleeping too much, ditto.

ARGH!!!!

My New Constant Companion

Based on the title you probably thought this would be about my new dog. While I have a new dog, my new constant companion is not the dog.

It's pain.

Back pain usually from early in the morning, while still in bed, until about 30 min. after I get up and move around. The stiffness hits me in my sleep, and wakes me up between 5 and 7 hours after I fall asleep.

Hip pain from misalignment, from walking too much, from sitting too long, from standing too long, from crossing my legs at the ankles too much.

Muscular pain but only after fatigue, and accompanied by twitching.

Emotional pain, imagining that this will never get better and I have to live with this for the next 48 years (because I have always planned to be 100 at the very least before I die). Also because no doctor offers me relief anymore, because no one in my life really gets it or helps. Because all I want is to move, work, dance, and feel NORMAL. Or at least pain-free.

Also painful is admitting any of this, talking about it. It does NOT make it better. Helpful comments do NOT help, despite the intention of the commenter. Reading websites for support is NOT supportive. I haven't yet found a doctor who understands it in a professional way. (There was the one doctor a while back, but he's in another city now, probably retired. And he wasn't exactly encouraging.)

A final element of pain is the public opinion that I didn't have a "full case" of polio and therefore, I won't suffer as much. And hey, look at FDR! He was president four times, and moved mountains. Look at that poet guy! What determination! Such great examples! NOT helping, folks.

At this point, I'm looking for a guru or wizard to make sense of it all, someone who won't blame me. The tiny bit of hope I find is in two things: my dogs are oblivious but loving, and researchers have found fragments of the polio virus in the spinal fluid of post-polio syndrome patients. This might provide answers to the cause, but in the end, it's not cancer. It's very low-end research, not sexy at all, and therefore, no one really cares or will fund anything remotely near a "breakthrough."

Negativity, fatigue, depression and degeneration are also part of the syndrome. Yay! Non-prescription solutions for depression involve.... EXERCISE. Which I am told is not indicated. Screw that. Yesterday, I could hardly get off the couch, but when I was out watching my dogs run around like idiots, I was not in pain.

Not a lot of writing gets done when pain is present. If I could figure out a way to run my dogs and write at the same time, then I'd be golden. And I may have done just exactly that. Stay tuned.

And yes I do have a new dog. He's quite silly and waggy. He is over the top optimistic and unapologetic about it. I like that. I am unapologetic about starting sentences with And. We have that lack of apology in common.

Where Did It Go?

The writing. Where is it? Gone? On vacation? Squashed down, hiding? Snuffed out?

I'm trying to decide if it's the teaching of such mediocre and "at-risk" students that saps my energy. Well, yes, it does that, but teaching has never stolen my voice. That inner voice that tells me what to write, that makes up words and sentences as soon as I sit down to work. I am not bugged by that voice anymore, not awakened by it, not interrupted in mid-lecture with thoughts that I should write down.

Is this it? Is it over? With just the handful of scholarly publications, the glossy magazine features, and the file cabinet drawer of unpublished stuff?

I worry, deeply, about this.

Distractions

I embarked on this Holidailies project as a way to get into a discipline of writing, because I was NOT in one. Not a regular writing appointment, daily, with a journal. I thought it would be good to have/establish one.

But I find that there is a larger problem afoot. Not only do I have too many distractions and things that take me out of writing (such as crafts, constant housework, new games on the goggle box, movies, etc.), but I'm also finding that my depression is waxing and waning, mostly waxing.

The most alarming "symptom" at this point is that the usual voices in my head (hush - not the crazy ones, but the fiction ones - the characters in my stories) HAVE STOPPED TALKING. It's lonely and cold without them. It's been a few weeks since I stopped to write something down, or even thought "I need to write that down."

Have I lost the Muse? Have I lost my will to write? This is far more alarming that missing a week or more in a project that I voluntarily took on.

The remedy that I know of for this problem is to quiet my mind. Christmas Day was lovely (the Eve as well) because a sudden snowstorm shut everything down early. I went out for walks in it. A pretty but blowy and dangerous storm, actually. For this area. But it hushed everything. It stilled my mind just long enough for me to realize that the internal dialogue had stopped.

To quiet my mind, I have decided to rid myself of projects and only tackle those that a) earn my living and b) make life conducive to the creative side. There are stories to tell. I feel that I will not survive if I don't tell them. Time for writing, yoga, fewer screens, more ink, more walks with my dog. Distractions are necessary or life will not be balanced, but from now on, I'm choosing to pursue as many distractions as I can that nurture the creative me.

Photography as Entry Point for Writing

(A found handout from my days of teaching next door to the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona. "Visual literacy" is the buzzword, but the media-saturated students are consumers not critics. Photography provides a "safe" space for them to exercise their critical wings.)

When you are looking at a black and white photograph, you are looking at something already at least two degrees from reality. One, it’s a representation of a moment from real life (still life, portrait, etc), AND it’s removed of color. So you have a frozen moment AND an abstraction.

Consider the following –
Genre
Many genres of photography are used to categorize and understand their subjects. As with poetry and prose (sonnet, drama, novel, blank verse), there are many different types of b/w photograph: photojournalistic, documentary, creative, abstract, still life, portrait, commercial.

Composition
Darkroom techniques can enhance a photo, turn it “sepia” and “old-fashioned” or layer it with other images.

Color, light, shadow
Try this: take a photo and put it on a copier which is programmed to read only BLACK or WHITE. See what is lost in the copy from the photo.

In b/w, you don’t just have black and white. There are hundreds of grays, a deep dark black, a black with some shapes of darker black, a completely white area. You want to look for “information” in each area — is that a technical flaw or is that intentionally a purely black area on the photograph? Are the grays warm or cold? Look for positive and negative areas, which can be black, white, or gray, depending on the subject.

Point of View/Angle
Imagine yourself standing behind the photographer, imagine yourself in the photo, and imagine yourself as the photographer.

Context
From the title and date (if there is one), what can you tell about the photograph? List all the contextual elements that might be weighing on the photograph, invisibly. What larger body of work is this photo part of? What other works/artists are like this photo/photographer?

Personal Response
Finally, how does this photograph have significance to you in your lifespan? As a part of this country, as part of the human race? How might the photo have significance to YOUR reader? What would you like to say to the reader if you were looking at the photo together?

Santa Lives!

Holidailies offers a prompt today, asking for new iconic figures for the holidays if one is tired of Santa.

I won't go all Yes, Virginia on my readers, but I have a button that reads SANTA LIVES! And he does. He's peeking over my monitor at me right now. That is the very wee Santa finger puppet who lives in my office, along with Capt. Jack Sparrow, Buddha, Cobra Bubbles (from Lilo & Stitch), and Ned Flanders (a burger toy). Ned has since departed this mortal coil, actually. And somewhere around here is a felted lab mouse with a very pink tail. There are other toys too: the Night Bus from Harry Potter, done in Lego; a handful of "intelligent" toys for executives and a handheld Yahtzee game. But my favorites are the little people who work with me.

I shall never tire of characters. In the same way that I wrote about the stories earlier this week, I feel as passionately about characters. Natalie Goldberg, a guru of mine, poses a writing task for practice: Describe everything about a person that you can in one sentence.

Today, on my walk with my dog, I saw a man in a brown coat, tennis shoes and a black hat, carrying the newspaper still in its plastic bag while he walked two small dirty white dogs who seemed very excited to be going anywhere.

As I was musing, my dog sniffed the air, trying to see what they were up to, but they were too far away. I imagined little story capsules for this man and his dogs...

A woman was waiting for him inside the house, a bit impatiently because she wanted to drink her coffee and read the paper but he insisted on walking the dogs before he brought it in. She thought that her coffee might get too cold, and it would all be ruined unless he came in before three minutes had passed.

***

The man, whose name is Sidney, lost his wife a year ago, and he really only enjoys the Sunday morning walk with the dogs. The rest of Sunday is one long lonely time, punctuated by phone calls from his daughters who both live far away now.

***

The dogs were rescued from his neighbor's house last week where there had been a fire. The owners were still in the hospital, and the man was beginning to enjoy walking them. Even after the neighbors came home, he planned to walk their dogs. Or maybe get his own dog.

***

Etc. No, I can never get tired of Santa. Whether he's a jolly old elf, a bad enabler for wanton consumerism, a corruption of "the reason for the season," or a magical realism coyote trickster who brings coal, switches or Barbies, Santa is a perfectly good icon and I'll keep him, thank you.

Besides, he really likes the cookies and brandy I set out for him every year.

Writing Essentials

Writing is not about the words or the art or the stories, really. That’s reading. When you sit and read what someone has written, you are carried away by the beauty of the words, the engine of a great plot (or even a bad one), and the other world you occupy for just a while.

But writing itself? The essentials really boil down to this: the chair, the keyboard, the retreat.

Everything else is distraction.

Let’s define our terms. The chair: that place from which you apply pen to paper, fingers to keyboard. It might be standing up, as we hear reports of Hemingway having done. (That might explain his simpler sentence structure.) It might be a mahogany desk and carved matching chair, a camp stool in Africa, or a spare dining room chair pulled up to a card table.

For me, it’s a really uncomfortable broken-down office chair that wants replacing. It squeaks. I have a Herman Miller Aeron chair in my Amazon shopping cart, but what is the guarantee that even a $600 chair won’t end up killing my back after three hours of sitting? A chiropractor told me that, after 45 minutes, ANY chair is going to be bad for you.

But the chair is that object that you keep your butt in so that you can continue to put words on a page. That's the only way I know for writing to get written.

The keyboard: The writing instrument, really. These days, it’s a keyboard. My fingers fly faster this way, and tap out words almost as fast as I can think them. I have a typewriter that got me started about 40 years ago, and every now and then, I tap on it. If I had to do that now, I think it would cause sudden and permanent carpal tunnel. I also have writing instruments called pens. My favorites are Uniball pens in purple and blue. It says “waterproof” but they are not.

Of course, you must connect the keyboard to a computer, or the typewriter and pen to paper, but these days, paper just doesn’t matter. I’m not sure I could make the cognitive switch to a Kindle or Sony reader, but that day is coming, sooner or later. I still write and imagine the feel of my book in my hands. But paper or screen, it matters not to me.

Finally, the retreat. By this, I mean the quiet house, the silenced cell phone, the kids occupied at something or out of the house so that the whispers from the Muse can get through. But also, the distractions must be minimized to keep one from checking email or seeing if Amazon has dropped the price on a box of pens or a new keyboard (because I need both). However, it cannot be too quiet. Birds outside the window, the pacing border collie wishing for a walk, the steady hum of the spin cycle. These are happy noises that keep the words coming....

Now that this writing is done, it’s time to tend to folding the laundry, putting away the dishes and walking the dog. But perhaps there will be more writing later today... unless I succumb to the thousand distractions conspiring to keep me from chair, keyboard and retreat.