The Daily News
1 Damn.
2 I had a bazillion things to write here this day, but last night, we had a cold-cut feast with Josh and Caitlin, Maren and Isla.
3 At one point, everything got busy, and I found myself suddenly holding Maren.
4 G-pas out there will agree with me on this one: once you're of an age, little growing babies take you away.
5 She fell asleep on my chest. Isla was across the room being her own beautiful self.
6 They've both developed voices, for the record. And when either is gassed or stressed, they turn bright red, and then I hear what sounds like dishwasher plumbing going down their drains and churgling.
7 Uh...I made up that word. Don't Google it. I'll save you time. Churgling.
8 I right-clicked it from this website, and the top word to come up was "churchgoing." It's not. It's an offshoot of gurgle, but that word has become cliche'.
9 Never mind looking further. It seemed the best word, and if I were Webster, or Merriam, or even the dotorious Dictionary.com, I would have placed this definition for churgle:
churgle:
chur' gul
noun
1. the sound a baby makes when it has plumbing going through its drains.
10 The word "dotorious" is simply the doting and love-of-beauty a grandparent has for a baby. It is considered a distant cousin of "notorious" only with positive connotations. I know. I made up both words. The noun form is "dotoriety."
11 I'm pretty sure we are all born with this quality built in us.
12 Okay. Enough of that.
13 Let us move on, if we may.
14 Moving On, Part One: This one goes out to nearly everyone. It is advice to anyone who wears socks.
15 Listen: you own your socks. They don't own you.
16 For whatever reason, I wrote this entire piece with my socks on last night.
17 You know to take off shoes, but often, our socks own us.
18 I kept them on, strangling my ankles the entire time I was writing this. I twisted my bum ankle, the one with the Achilles issue yesterday morning. It turned black and blue.
19 I probably favored the foot, and got sub-consciously owned by socks.
20 I get lost doing this sometimes, so little did I realize until I finally took them off that it became akin to Pandora opening the box.
21 Once I removed my socks, all the troubles in the world flew away, leaving only hope.
22
23
23
23 Dude. I wash my feet more than Jesus does.
24 A guy who walks on water must have the cleanest feet in the universe. Think about it.
25 So I removed my socks last night, and all the troubles in the world flew away, yes, but underneath it all existed a pair of sacredly clean feet.
26 Moving On, Part One: I have written about how writers get their ideas, and recently brought in Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. to squelch the American love affair with Christopher Columbus.
27 I got into Vonnegut years ago because I had heard Slaughterhouse-Five was a great read.
28 Look: any book that is 215 pages is a good read, in my estimation. Even if it is a foolish book, but why would you continue reading a foolish book, right?
29 Oh.
30 That's right.
31 Some teachers assign them. M'bad.
32 The first thing that I liked about it is that Chapter One is an intro.
33 And it draws you in.
34 The US/UK bombing of Dresden, Germany in February,1945 can be a moneymaker, especially if written by a guy who lived through it.
35 But Vonnegut had trouble visiting the story, and turned it instead into a fictitious story about a character named Billy Pilgrim, who came unstuck in time.
36 In other words, he might be walking down his hallway as a fifty-year old man, and suddenly find himself in a barracks back in 1944, young again.
37 So the real events in the story are true, but too painful for Vonnegut to write as a piece of non-fiction.
38 Most people who were there tip their caps to Vonnegut for this monumental piece of literature.
39 Is it accurate? Death tolls are not considered exact science. Everything in Vonnegut's account appears accurate with the exception of the Americans doing a night raid. He didn't want the British to think he was putting all the blame on them.
40 I report all this because writing a fiction about a real event in one's life is a great place to seek writing ideas. You don't need to write about a huge disaster, but you should open up your ideas to the world around you.
41 I'll just lay that one out there. I would like to give everyone a peek at Chapter One of Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (1969):
All this happened more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn't his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on. I've changed all the names.
I really did go back to Dresden with Guggenheim money (God love it) in 1967. It looked a lot like Dayton, Ohio, more open spaces than Dayton has. There must be tons of human bone meal in the ground.
42 Writing tip: the most important sentence in that second paragraph was clearly the last one. Get a reader wondering about an idyllic place like Dayton, Ohio, and then nonchalantly go into a sentence at the end that powers the entire piece forward. I still shake when I read that sentence. Sorry for the interruption. Here's the next part:
43
I went back there with an old war buddy, Bernard V. O'Hare, and we made friends with a cab driver, who took us to the slaughterhouse where we had been locked up at night as prisoners of war. His name was Gerhard Muller. He told us that he was a prisoner of the Americans for a while. We asked him how it was to live under Communism, and he said that it was terrible at first, because everybody had to work so hard, and because there wasn't much shelter or food or clothing. But things were much better now.
He had a pleasant little apartment, and his daughter was getting
an excellent education. His mother was incinerated in the Dresden fire-storm. So it goes.
He sent O'Hare a postcard at Christmastime, and here is what it said:
"I wish you and your family also as to your friend Merry Christmas and a happy New Year and I hope that we'll meet again in a world of peace and freedom in the taxi cab if the accident will."
I like that very much: "If the accident will."
I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time. When I got home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to write would be to report what I had seen. And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece or at least that it would make me a lot of money, since the subject was so big.
But not many words about Dresden came from my mind then---
not enough of them to make a book, anyway. And not many words come now, either, when I have become an old fart with his memories and his Pall Malls, with his sons full grown.
I think of how useless the Dresden part of my memory has been, and how tempting Dresden has been to write about, and I am reminded of the famous limerick:
There was a young man from Stamboul,
Who soliloquized thus to his tool:
"You took all my wealth
And you ruined my health,
And now you won't pee, you old fool."
And I'm reminded, too, of the song that goes:
My name is Yon Yonson,
I work in Wisconsin,
I work in a lumbermill there.
The people I meet when I walk down the street,
They say, "What's your name?"
And I say,
"My name is Yon Yonson,
I work in Wisconsin..."
And so on to infinity.
Over the years, people I've met have often asked me what I'm working on, and I've usually replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden.
I said that to Harrison Starr, the movie-maker, one time, and he raised his eyebrows and inquired, "Is it an anti-war book?"
"Yes," I said. "I guess."
"You know what I say to people when I hear they're writing anti-
war books?"
"No, what do you say, Harrison Starr?"
"I say, 'Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?"
What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.
44 And on and on.
45 People who grew up reading Vonnegut know that he has certain repeating phrases. "And on and on," for instance, runs through his books.
46 "And so on" is another.
47 When someone dies, he would say, "So it goes."
48 And so on.
49 The clock on the wall tells me it is quitting time. I can linger no longer in Le Luge, my new/used Lay-Z-Boy, dark brown and akin to lying in a luge before it flies downhill.
50 I like it because it is already a tad threadbare, so I won't get distressed if I rip into it on occasion.
51 I bought the TOOOOOOONDRA pre-scratched as well. Although it contained tons of scratches, they were in the bed. When I first got it so many years ago, it had a classic new car smell, and I loved it. Not that fake stuff they spray at car washes, the real deal you get at a Toyota lot.
52 That lasted exactly one week when we crammed a bunch of students into two cars in search of a place to have a Senior picnic in '05. It got caught in some dirt, and the senior boys insisted on using wood and brute strength to get it unleashed. The day was hot, the dust having its way through all the windows, and all over the seats.
53 Haha, I just had to throw that memory out there.
54 There are worse things. Worse, not worst.
55 Gottago.
56 See you again.
57 Peace.
26 Moving On, Part One: I have written about how writers get their ideas, and recently brought in Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. to squelch the American love affair with Christopher Columbus.
27 I got into Vonnegut years ago because I had heard Slaughterhouse-Five was a great read.
28 Look: any book that is 215 pages is a good read, in my estimation. Even if it is a foolish book, but why would you continue reading a foolish book, right?
29 Oh.
30 That's right.
31 Some teachers assign them. M'bad.
32 The first thing that I liked about it is that Chapter One is an intro.
33 And it draws you in.
34 The US/UK bombing of Dresden, Germany in February,1945 can be a moneymaker, especially if written by a guy who lived through it.
35 But Vonnegut had trouble visiting the story, and turned it instead into a fictitious story about a character named Billy Pilgrim, who came unstuck in time.
36 In other words, he might be walking down his hallway as a fifty-year old man, and suddenly find himself in a barracks back in 1944, young again.
37 So the real events in the story are true, but too painful for Vonnegut to write as a piece of non-fiction.
38 Most people who were there tip their caps to Vonnegut for this monumental piece of literature.
39 Is it accurate? Death tolls are not considered exact science. Everything in Vonnegut's account appears accurate with the exception of the Americans doing a night raid. He didn't want the British to think he was putting all the blame on them.
40 I report all this because writing a fiction about a real event in one's life is a great place to seek writing ideas. You don't need to write about a huge disaster, but you should open up your ideas to the world around you.
41 I'll just lay that one out there. I would like to give everyone a peek at Chapter One of Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (1969):
ONE
All this happened more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn't his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on. I've changed all the names.
I really did go back to Dresden with Guggenheim money (God love it) in 1967. It looked a lot like Dayton, Ohio, more open spaces than Dayton has. There must be tons of human bone meal in the ground.
42 Writing tip: the most important sentence in that second paragraph was clearly the last one. Get a reader wondering about an idyllic place like Dayton, Ohio, and then nonchalantly go into a sentence at the end that powers the entire piece forward. I still shake when I read that sentence. Sorry for the interruption. Here's the next part:
43
I went back there with an old war buddy, Bernard V. O'Hare, and we made friends with a cab driver, who took us to the slaughterhouse where we had been locked up at night as prisoners of war. His name was Gerhard Muller. He told us that he was a prisoner of the Americans for a while. We asked him how it was to live under Communism, and he said that it was terrible at first, because everybody had to work so hard, and because there wasn't much shelter or food or clothing. But things were much better now.
He had a pleasant little apartment, and his daughter was getting
an excellent education. His mother was incinerated in the Dresden fire-storm. So it goes.
He sent O'Hare a postcard at Christmastime, and here is what it said:
"I wish you and your family also as to your friend Merry Christmas and a happy New Year and I hope that we'll meet again in a world of peace and freedom in the taxi cab if the accident will."
I like that very much: "If the accident will."
I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time. When I got home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to write would be to report what I had seen. And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece or at least that it would make me a lot of money, since the subject was so big.
But not many words about Dresden came from my mind then---
not enough of them to make a book, anyway. And not many words come now, either, when I have become an old fart with his memories and his Pall Malls, with his sons full grown.
I think of how useless the Dresden part of my memory has been, and how tempting Dresden has been to write about, and I am reminded of the famous limerick:
There was a young man from Stamboul,
Who soliloquized thus to his tool:
"You took all my wealth
And you ruined my health,
And now you won't pee, you old fool."
And I'm reminded, too, of the song that goes:
My name is Yon Yonson,
I work in Wisconsin,
I work in a lumbermill there.
The people I meet when I walk down the street,
They say, "What's your name?"
And I say,
"My name is Yon Yonson,
I work in Wisconsin..."
And so on to infinity.
Over the years, people I've met have often asked me what I'm working on, and I've usually replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden.
I said that to Harrison Starr, the movie-maker, one time, and he raised his eyebrows and inquired, "Is it an anti-war book?"
"Yes," I said. "I guess."
"You know what I say to people when I hear they're writing anti-
war books?"
"No, what do you say, Harrison Starr?"
"I say, 'Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?"
What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.
44 And on and on.
45 People who grew up reading Vonnegut know that he has certain repeating phrases. "And on and on," for instance, runs through his books.
46 "And so on" is another.
47 When someone dies, he would say, "So it goes."
48 And so on.
49 The clock on the wall tells me it is quitting time. I can linger no longer in Le Luge, my new/used Lay-Z-Boy, dark brown and akin to lying in a luge before it flies downhill.
50 I like it because it is already a tad threadbare, so I won't get distressed if I rip into it on occasion.
51 I bought the TOOOOOOONDRA pre-scratched as well. Although it contained tons of scratches, they were in the bed. When I first got it so many years ago, it had a classic new car smell, and I loved it. Not that fake stuff they spray at car washes, the real deal you get at a Toyota lot.
52 That lasted exactly one week when we crammed a bunch of students into two cars in search of a place to have a Senior picnic in '05. It got caught in some dirt, and the senior boys insisted on using wood and brute strength to get it unleashed. The day was hot, the dust having its way through all the windows, and all over the seats.
53 Haha, I just had to throw that memory out there.
54 There are worse things. Worse, not worst.
55 Gottago.
56 See you again.
57 Peace.
~H~
fin.
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