To write is to hope. What does that mean? This isn’t a school essay. I’ll let others read whatever they want or need into the expression. At its simplest, for me it means staying alive i.e. refusing to give up no matter what a fuck-up your life may be, at any given moment. Writing is my way to push through the dreck. Life is absurd. May as well avoid the lush violin strains as an accompaniment to that basic fact, especially if the maudlin – an ever-present temptation – happens to give you hives.

In the most practical of terms, yesterday brought me the assurance I’d have money with which to pay my bills not only in Feruary but in March and all the way to August (another six-month contract); the guaranteed three-year contract  is indeed guaranteed, meaning it should-may-might kick in next September. When I broke down in her office, my boss told me there was no way she wouldn’t find a way to keep me. So, that part of the equation is as good as it can yield.

There was also lots of talk about addiction, yesterday at work. Not idle bar-type talk or learned discussions on the whys and the wherefores of. Factual, as non-judgemental as possible and, in some cases, straight-in-your-face talk to a person sitting in the office to whom two or three others are saying: here’s the nature of your problem. We all know it. There’s not a damn thing we can do to help you, if you don’t acknowledge what it’s doing to your chances at a real job, and  if you don’t decide to use the help that’s being offered – or find some other help, if that makes more sense to you.

As always, in my case, that kind of hard and necessary talk leading me right back to asking myself how best to cope with those parts of my life proving intractable to empathy, compassion and loving kindness and/or where combinations of those fine traits have proven as toxic as a modified strain of the common cold. Meaning: when those people I wish to know don’t want to know me; and when those I don’t want around refuse to leave.

Fiction-wise, what I can make of anything of this or of other matters, I have no idea at the moment. All I know, is that writing is the only addiction that goes on making sense to me, no matter what.

Life of the real kind is playing  in the same way. How I’ll make it to firmer ground, both in story and in living conditions: some clues I need to follow. Some actions I need to take. Some peace of mind I need to secure for myself.

For the time being, both in story and in real life, I have to ask myself which is worse: gleeful maliciousness, playing havoc with other people’s lives for the hell of it; or the tyrannies and tortures inflicted by a conflict of good intentions.

Right now, this very minute: oy.

The specific mix of this specific oy: wanting to laugh; wanting to whimper; wanting to go back to sleep and find out what happens after the friendly deus ex machina of dreamland hands me the piece of stone. A very specific piece of stone; no, I’m  not sharing its specificity with anyone. Deus ex machina told me nothing about secrecy; he didn’t have to.

The rest of the oy: messy drafts; blogs I’ve committed myself to put online (why? who knows; because better than playing tiddly-winks? who knows); the Wednesday work marathon awaiting – nine (9) children between the ages of eight (8) and thirteen (13), at odds with reading, writing, ‘rithmetic and vast segments of reality,  between me and coming home to the messy drafts tonight.

Current draft: What if I change her name, and move the story to another town? Or, wait. What if… The piece of stone. Yes. Right.

Oy.

Some people compute time by years; some by schools attended; or jobs; I tend to compute time by houses. The specific memory triggering this realization being an exchange with someone I trace back to three houses ago.

Three houses ago, I’d just completed a work of fiction I had set in a fictional town in Florida’s Panhandle. No one had ever paid much attention to my writing, save for the copy I produced for other people’s reports, opinion pieces and speeches. The attention paid to those being of the proprietary kind – the client requesting more resounding adverbs, or the client’s wife wanting a bit more attention paid to her central role as helpmeet and facilitator to her husband’s place in the pale Northern sun.

The exchange centered on risk. The exact words don’t matter. The message was: you can’t write good fiction (or good anything else), and play it safe.

Three houses ago, the issue for me then became: thank you, fine and dandy, I agree; but how do you grapple with some issues without having them explode in your face? How do you avoid the slide down into sodden self-pity, or the flaming, screaming rant against the… the… oh, fuck it, I can’t stand this! Fuck you! Go away! Let a stray meteorite wipe us out, let’s get this over with! (Lots of variations available here, obviously: animal rights, climate change – did I mention France just lost its triple A rating?)

As more and more “material” accumulates in this rough draft every day, the issue now before me is how to shape some of it into… aye, there’s the rub. Huge pieces of life itself are proving even more absurd than I ever suspected. At least one more-or-less deadpan narrator feels essential to the process, along with at least one more-or-less naive voice, such as that of a child. Ergo – for the time being, anyway: looking at the draft through the eyes of one outsider, stuck inside a place she doesn’t care for all that much, and one child, stuck inside the unanswerable riddles adults foist on their young.

The contemporary ring to the message I registered three houses ago being: no matter when the events to which they refer took place, always keep the characters on the growing edge of now i.e. somewhat befuddled, somewhat bemused, hovering somewhere between tears, laughter and plain-as-plain-syrup astonishment.

Edgy. You feel it when you read it, no  matter who the writer is or what the home turf happens to be. Taking chances; pushing it as far as you can take it, whatever the it may be. Meaning: whatever emotional risk is involved. At least, that’s what writing is about for me.

The risk: flatness. Falling flat on your face because you went too far. Being boring because you didn’t push it far enough.

OK. Boredom, then. Flat out snore. Wrong crowd. Wrong time. Wrong place. Ah. A glimmer of something. Wrong place; wrong person; different set of expectations. “I thought you meant…”

Why are the characters in this place? How did they get here? Do they expect to stay, do they want to move on? Can they leave? Why don’t they?

The place. Its physical layout. Where the characters live; what it says about them; how it affects the way they see themselves or how others see them (or don’t).

What they do in their spare time. Where they hang out. With whom. Doing what. What matters most. What happens when the fog rolls in, and they’re not so sure of where the edges are anymore.

posters of books and of their authors.

announcements for book signings, meetings with the authors, learned conferences on their work.

more books, inspired by books read, and authors admired.

People. In the bookstores, in the streets; in the stores holding their January sales; in the parks. Alone, by twos, in bunches.

Street people. Begging, entertaining, packing up their wares, or checking out the limp on their dog. Tourists snapping their own versions of the postcards on sale a few meters away from them.

Walking until words find a shape. Writing them down; most of them aren’t worth looking at twice. Walking some more, waiting for the right ones to show up.

(mandala by Martine Bouyer)

States of mind. There’s some user-input involved in them. Diet, exercise, where a person usually parks his or her attention i.e. personal beliefs, social contacts, habits in living and in thinking,  etc and so forth. Entire shelves in libraries and bookstores devoted to the topic of understanding states of mind; entire industries based on peoples’ hopes of  achieving  proficiency in guiding the damn things through the shoals.

On the sidewalk,  yesterday: walking behind a couple. The distance between them varied depending on the obstacles – gaps in the pavement, garbage, another person walking toward them. Still; they shared a destination (as it happened: the store that sells second-hand everything next to where I live). When I passed them on my way elsewhere, the expression on their faces confirmed what the slant of their shoulders already announced. Theirs was a bond of shared worries; it didn’t seem to provide any lightness to their steps.  But the world out there was their common enemy and the main alibi for having so little fun together. (Of course, all this based on my own state of mind at the time; maybe the two of them are the jolliest, and happiest of couples when the taxman isn’t beating down their door; which would provide another scenario entirely.)

My destination being a local exhibition of mandalas; one of them intriguing enough to make me consider spending money I don’t have in order to own it. At which point a little girl came sobbing into my arms because her mother had just told her no, sweetheart, I can’t afford to buy you the mandala of your dreams. The little girl and I stood in front of the object of her longing (pictured above). She looked at it; cried and cried. I said what seemed appropriate; gave her a hug; walked back to the apartment; finished a scene not brimming with jollity. Read around, searching for the small something that would lift me into another state of mind.

Someone has offered to drive me to Toulouse, this afternoon where we’ll both go about our own interests, then ride back together. Both the characters and myself delighted at the opportunity to bring new elements into the mix.

One more school visit this morning. Then, back to the house for a visit from the landlord. Object lesson for the day: why is the water flowing out from under the bath tub instead of the drain? We shall not cease our questionings until all the answers are in.

The school I visited yesterday reminded me of F.A.C.E.S. the Fine Arts Core grade school my daughter attended years ago. Old brick building, filled with bright colors and artwork by the children.

One of the local artists is now on staff at my place of work. Joined my language workshop yesterday just as two new participants showed up, both with minimal French. The word “couleur” then becoming the word of the day from which we understood the workings of two combos of letters : o+u and e+u, then worked out the words rouge and bleu, added the word noir to get the o+i combo, and ended up reading and writing seven words: jour, rouge, bleu, heureux, noir, soir and voir. We laughed a lot; the women are coming back and signing up for this year’s Caméléones – a project whereby women work with Mika to illustrate themselves on strips of wallpaper that are glued in public spaces on March 8th.

Sometimes, it’s the job that provides the breathing room. First meeting with a young boy, late yesterday afternoon; the eldest of six children of a Rom family, going on twelve years old, and presently registered in the  twelfth school he’s attended so far. The kind of life that throws some perspective on your  own problems, whatever they may be. Also gives new meaning to: living with discrimination, and discovering ways to thrive and grow anyway.

should should should. be racing through this post so as to get the other blog online so as to walk Cybèle, so as to get myself ready for a dash to another local school so as to sell the services offered by my fine place of employment so as to run back to said in order to provide some of those services myself. The dash to a local school happens again tomorrow morning (day off? more or less).

I don’t mind busy. I don’t mind challenge. I do mind crowding. I do mind having to insist on civilized behavior – doing so with young children is part of the contract, so to speak. Having to do so with grownups takes a lot out of you. Respect. Old-fashioned; that’s me. You don’t barge in on someone. You don’t decide for someone else, once they reach an age when deciding for yourself is part of the deal. You don’t let someone else decide for you either. Or if you’ve done so and regret it,  you work out the consequences for yourself; it’s called self-respect and learning from your mistakes, at least, in my opinion.

A lot of the people I met yesterday were into the blame game. “It’s because so-and-so did this”; “it’s because my mother/father/sister/brother didn’t let me do….”. The winner, of course, being the captain of the sinking vessel claiming he fell off the deck trying to save the passengers, drifted away in a lifeboat with no one else in it than another member of his crew, which is why he couldn’t supervise the evacuation, so tell me please: how many dead?

All this being part of the prep for an upcoming encounter with the powers-that-be in the fictional town I use as part of my personal sanity pack.

Respect – definition of. Depends on who’s talking, doesn’t it?

Now. 6:59 am. No matter what, I need to find some way to feel uncrowded between now and the walk over to école Gambetta. Whether the world is unfolding as it should not being part of my job to supervize.

Multiple layers of reactions to this tag (it reads: “Flymen – Graulhet iz us nobody else”. There’s an overlay or underlay of NTM, meaning you should go do forbidden things to your mother).

First layer: ah-ha, now I know who Flymen is. Followed by: folks who goof off and flunk out of their back-to-work contracts can’t count on anonymity no more (using flymen’s grmmar, here). As soon as I read the message and saw the handwriting, I knew exactly who was talking to everybody else than the “us” in flymen’s mind. The everybody else including me, and anyone else who wasn’t born of immigrant parents in this town. Flymen has his exact replicate in the upper town who considers the “us” only applies to those who were born in families settled in this town for two or more generations.

A day with so many layers to it, there was  no way to process it all. During improv yesterday afternoon, four of us had to play out the rush scene in the kitchen of a restaurant filled with visiting dignitaries – the President of the Republic then paying us an impromptu visit with the fawning and simpering owner who’d been giving us hell two minutes earlier. Less than thirty seconds to distribute the roles “backstage”, and a minimal sense of how the kitchen was laid out on the bare stage itself. It was a messy improv; they all are, at the moment. No matter. (The finest moment in the theater workshop: three of us, each balancing one long stick off the two others’ fingertips, and moving around the room, while changing the patterns and positions of arms and, obviously, of the sticks.)

The draft? Digesting some of the other layers relating to the message on flymen’s tag, for one. Listening to the individual voices. What is the “real story” for this character, compared to that other? Some of the characters appearing to be more in sync than others, in terms of their understanding of events, or their sensibilities; others seeming far removed from any considerations other than their personal vision of what counts, and what doesn’t. Plus, readings; plus, real life events at work involving babies (two births, one expected and celebrated; one, a shock, discovery and decisive moment for a young man of twenty-one; a third, an unexpected pregnancy and the decisions a young woman must make about her future.)

Not to mention all the rest of yesterday. Not to mention whatever else today will add to the mix.

P.S. This is my contribution today to the fight against Corporate Big Brother censorship: to go right on blogging as usual.