Finding Christmas Traditions

The Christmas season has come and gone for another year. Once again I've spent days leading up to Christmas waiting for the spirit of the season to take hold of me. I read about Christmas traditions families have and hear all about couples having problems creating a Christmas experience that they both feels captures that feeling they had growing up with their families. Something about the season that is brings up sentimental feelings and memories of past Christmas joys. People have events they they look forward to each year: trimming the tree, exchanging gifts with family members, having a certain kind of food that is only made at Christmas, writing Santa your wish list(or the Christmas Pig if you were a Buell), opening gifts on Christmas Eve or Christmas morning, and making your loved ones feel the love that you have for them.
When I was younger, I was blissfully unaware of what was going on behind the scenes to make Christmas happen..
The more I found out what actually went into making Christmas happen in my family, the less I felt a connection to it. It didn't take long before my Christmas season completely lost whatever it had contained when I was a kid. I had written many Christmas lists at the request of my parents only for it to inevitably be ignored, if they even remembered to get me gifts, regardless of how easy I made it for them. The tradition of the Christmas day let down and apology. It was lucky if the tree was up and decorated before Christmas morning at 3 AM. A tradition of losing ornaments to the bleary eyes of sleep deprivation and poor planning. My siblings and I never really got gifts for each other, because by the time any of us had any extra money to spend we'd already scattered off to college or a new city so it never came up. A tradition of being broke-ass kids and harboring animosity towards one another.
There was always a tradition of having a meal with my extended family. I never liked it as a kid and the older I got the more it became clear that no one in my family enjoyed it. Every year I'd get dragged to the home of my aunt and uncle to eat a meal prepared by people without a sense of taste or possibly just an unrelenting passion for exceptionally bland food. I was given a new piggy bank every year for most of my youth with no clear explanation other than: "you've got a piggy banks so we got you a new one this year;" which translates to "We gave you a bunch of banks, so now you have a collection so we'll continue to assume you want a new one for every Christmas and birthday you have with us." Eventually someone from my extended family suggested a Yankee swap gift exchange, so gifts became even more generic and terrible. This was where my extended family re-gifted the unwanted gifts they got from office parties and friends. This gift exchange became a tradition that I was never invited to, or was told about but then after purchasing a gift for it find out they decided to have the gift exchange that morning while my family wasn't there instead. To top all of this off my family and my extended family have been butting heads over every family gathering for years. The extended family does what they can to exclude my family from anything they may be doing. Frequently not even letting my family know that they are in town until they've been there a few days. I could go on about inappropriate comments blamed on too much holiday drinking by kind-hearted spouses and hours of sitting on the couch waiting for a ride home. This was always accompanied by a hope that I wouldn't have to converse with any of my inebriated relatives.
Through all of this I saw nothing among the traditions of my family that I wanted to continue on without them. Trying to recreate any of them doesn't feel like it'd help me get that Christmas spirit back all of a sudden either.

This year I don't like that I feel that way. I want to have Christmas traditions that I can enjoy for years. I want to feel the season in my guts not have to double check a calendar to see when the actual day is going to be. I don't even know how one starts a tradition. Doing something once with the promise to do it again the following year seems like it has a high probability of not becoming a tradition for the following year.
This year I finally started working on a new tradition. This year being an unemployed Christmas, I had to set the bar low for new traditions. I came up with the holiday lights hunt. In the evening, going for a walk to find a certain # of houses with Christmas lights. Can only count houses you walk past, can't go down the same street until you've reached your #, can't count houses you pass everyday already. This is the start of a tradition. I think having some sort of warm alcoholic drink would improve the tradition (eggnog with bourbon, mulled wine, etc). I feel like this is a step towards creating that Christmas feeling I used to have when I was a kid. I'm not sure if it will work, but I'm tired of having a tradition-less holiday season.

Wordiness to the Rescue

I've thought before about how the degree I pursued in college didn't really prepare me for a lucrative career after graduation. It didn't do much of anything for me except cause me to collect a lot of books that I have to haul with me whenever I move and give me a habit of wordy explanations to up the word count of essays I had to write years ago. At least those were my thoughts about it when I was extra broke and feeling glum. Yet in that moment my essay wordiness saved the day.

How did it do that you may ask? Well at the end of any given college semester there will always be a few students who have more money than they should and less of a work ethic than they should. So at the end of every semester I plaster craigslist with an ad for inexpensive essay writing. It doesn't always work, but every now and then I'll find somebody who will decide they like my prices enough that they'll buy their way through the end of the semester. Thank greatness for their weak moral fiber.

This year I was lucky enough to find a few of those folks who let their parents fatten my wallet. I enjoy it more than I should really. It reminds me of the countless late nights of wide awake essay writing, or in at least one case 45 minutes before the final essay was due to be turned in without exception. I enjoy forming an essay and trying to push the page count over whatever the minimum count is for the assignment.

I like to try to research as much as I can with google on whoever it is that is actually asking me to write something for them. It helps me figure out how likely they are to try to screw me out of my payment and if they do how I can get my payment out of them, i.e. contacting their professor or school or even just writing a blog post with all our emails on them. I feel like I shouldn't talk about the specifics of the essay or the students that most recent hired me, since they paid me on time. They also didn't try to bargain with my completely reasonable prices either. Given the school they are attending I imagine it is more a case of my reasonable prices seem super cheap to them. It wasn't difficult to figure out what school they were attending, and wouldn't have been even if they hadn't inadvertently provided me with the name of the professor and the title of the course. I just like to feel comfortable with my leverage in the situation, so I won't have to worry about getting paid. 

Since I left college, I've gone through the whole range of regret and resolution over my choice of major. I have a habit of seeing the worst parts about my choices sometimes. It's nice to be reminded of the good parts about them sometimes. That extra little boost helps to get me through this rainy winter that has taken over Long Beach as of late.

Rewriting a poem

I have a thing where I tend spew out a bunch of words for a poem because I like the way they sound more than they convey the idea I'm trying to get at. I can never edit my own poems very well until I've ignored them for a while. Usually the longer I ignore it the easier it is to decide whether it can be saved or not. If weeks later I can see something there that I really like, or is worth trying to say the same the same thing a different way, I will put some effort into the rewrite.

I've always wanted to describe my ideas behind editing things. What better way to do that than to use something of my own that I edited. Ladies and Gentleman I give you Champagne Song the OG version:

Safely tucked away alone at home
the fog filled ocean breeze
carries a whispered song into me.
It may not be a siren’s song
but I feet a lesser lure
draw me closer to the coast.

There, among the dense
swirling mist of a chilled morning,
I find the neck of an emptied
champagne bottle caught
in a tangle of mermaid hair seaweed.
The whispered song drifts
from its mouth as the
wind drags itself
over the opening.

Inside a wild iris,
with its soft purple petals,
rests at the bottom
guiding the tune
the wind plays off the lips
of the of the bottle.

Checking to see that I am alone
on the fog drenched beach,
I lift the bottle from
its nest of mermaid locks.
Hold it to my ear
trying to hear the words
to unlock all the secrets
it wants to confess.

The sun melts the fog
revealing the empty bottle
laden coastline before me.
The wild iris blinks
in the sunlight
and a wind picks up
the collective wailing song
of so many other lost empties.

Losing the wild iris words
in this melodic drone,
I whisper my own secrets
to the flower’s delicate petals.
Only  to hear my words
drowned out in the static of waves.
I sit, still alone, among
everyone else’s discarded empties.
and my own lost voice.


Where to begin? What don't I like about it? Start with the things you don't like about it:

Well I wrote this back during my time doing the Dirty Dozen workshop. At the time I was really interested in creating a very narrative story in my poems. I would get this images in my head and want to walk through them. I think a lot of them had really forced beginnings because I felt like I needed to justify the presence of the image by giving it a location and introducing myself as someone walking into the image. I don't like the way it turns out usually. This poem is no exception. The beginning has got to go. 
The interesting part is the wild iris, not the speaker sitting around and eventually going to find it. I get too narrative in this poem, creating a scene to justify each image. This is not something that is bad in and of itself, but doing this too much will lead to watering down the metaphors. The images get lost in the narrative. 
The reaction to the song is also something I want to keep. It ties it together. Creates and event and a reaction; which is the essential idea in the first one except it gets lost in the retelling of the event. The event needs to be happening in a more present sense of experiencing not retelling. Kurt Vonnegut said that you shouldn't ever have a sentence in your story that doesn't either reveal character or advance the plot. Get to the point and bare your soul from the get go.

Okay so that's what I had in mind before I rewrote the poem. I wanted to capture the main idea and the imagery, but without getting lost in the narrative. I wanted it to be an evocation of the experience, not a story about what it felt like to feel that.

Version 2
In the still movements of
a foggy morning at the beach,
a wild iris sits in a tangle of mermaid hair
composing a song for the drifting wind.

I settle in,
mesmerized by the gesticulating flower.
Its movements remind me
of wishes I made years ago.

The wild iris blinks
and fog melts off the coastline
revealing a glass orchestra
of champagne bottles.

Wind drifts through
the soft purple petals
playing an off-key opera
I wish I remembered loving already.
The lyrics are deja vu
on the tip of my tongue.

The song fills my head
as the wind dies out and the fog rolls back in.
I want whisper my own secrets
as lyrics to the winking iris,
but I my voice is enough
in the repetitious static
of fog and waves.



So that's it. That's what I got from leaving my poem alone for weeks and then finally getting back to it. I like the new poem more. This poem will probably go through more editing before I'm done with it, but that won't be for a while I don't think. I'll post any updates to it.

To book or not to book?

For the majority of my life I'd dreamed of being a published author. My ambitions throughout high school and most of college was to work on my writing to eventually be published. I wanted to have a tangible book to be able to put on a bookshelf someplace to gather dust. Since then I have come to question the idea of what it even means to become a published writer in an age of e-books and twitter's 180 character limits. Bloggers getting paid to do what they do without ever having to involve a large corporate entity's approval to put their words out there. What does it mean to even still want tangible books instead of an e-reader that has a whole library in it?

John Waters', a fellow Baltimorian, said it best: "We need to make books cool again. If you go home with somebody and they don't have books, don't fuck them"

I don't know if books will ever be able to be cool again in the way they once were. Having a new Android tablet often turns more heads than a bookshelf full of even the most amazing and wonderful books. Books may be a dying format like so many other analog media formats. On top of that where would I even go with a poetry manuscript to try and get someone to pay enough attention to publish it? I see a lot of small presses that are publishing poetry all over the place, but most of these places require a year long tour commitment to create the audience to buy the work. I'm still in the single digits as far as public performance goes. I want to be a poet, not a rock star. If I wanted to be a rock star I'd have joined a band.

I've been thinking a lot about how I'd like to pursue my ambitions to get my writing to an audience. I don't know how I'll go about it exactly. I just know that trying to get a collection of my work published isn't really something I want to do right now. I want to try to build on my performance. I need to spend more time reading my work aloud to get used to the sound of it. I need to stop hating the sound of my voice so much so I can record and learn from the way I read things. I accept that if I want to have a wider audience I need to work on my presentation.

I've been brain storming ideas. for what I may want to do. I think I want to try doing some recording of various places I enjoy and then record a poem over the audio of the footage. Maybe I can wrangle some of my other unemployed or empty scheduled friends to help out with it. It is a fledgling of an idea. It may work out better in my head than in execution, but who cares. It's something to keep busy with while I'm waiting for the next thing to come along and pay me to do something.

Poetry Post: Keep Calm and Carry On

I've lost the "f" in the un
of my employment.
My belt is finding notches
I've never needed.
I am losing weight
I didn't know I had.

The place I live holds
no more surprises.
I've collected the dust bunnies
in all the out of the way corners.

I'd exercise myself
into a healthy state of mind,
but I can't afford
to burn the calories.
My shoes don't have
very much sole left,
I don't want to waste it
pacing out my insecurities.

I just want to catch a break.
Give me a chance
and I'll find a way
to help fix it.
I'm tired of holding my breath
until I'm sure I should
have given up days ago.

Poetry Post: The Fish Tank Diver

I know I know. I'm shitty at updated, but I don't think I got a wide enough reader base for anyone to notice. I'll be better about it this week. I've got a lot I've been dealing with lately so I've been sort of scatter brained. Just starting to get everything settled to put some thoughts together into a blog.

In the meantime, here is my first draft of a poem I've been working on. I say first draft, because I tend to write something ignore it for some time then go back to it later to cut it all up and make it smoother. I never know how much editing will actually be done to it until after it happens.


The Fish Tank Diver
The life of a plastic fish tank diver
is stationary and boring.
He stands guard over a treasure chest
filled with fools gold and bubbles.

His gaze is fixed,
focused on point beyond the glass.

That was where he saw her.
Leaning close to the glass to feed the fish.
She was an air breather,
a dry-land girl.
She was beautiful,
give up your treasure and learn to dry out beautiful,
hold your breath to keep from scaring her away beautiful,
wish you could jump start your plastic guts and run away with her beautiful,
compelled to tell her nothing but the truth beautiful.

Since Welsh is the only language
that can be spoken under water
he confessed with it:
“wrth eu bodd”
“fy nghariad yn unig”

As his oxygenation broke the surface
she turned and leaned into his gaze
tapping the glass to say hello.
It was the first time
he’d felt the click clack of
his plastic heart beat.