I had a good day writing yesterday. The women on the Thomas group gave me just enough feedback to push me into reaching for what I have really been trying to write down. It's only one paragraph. Here's what I wrote:
"I'm distinguishing between two different experiential databases that I use to compare and make judgment of what's sot before me in real time. Hopefully, reason is the better part of both of them. The first one came into being due to the practices of my caregivers. The second only came into being after I began to hate them. Atonement of the two systems for thinking about things only when they reached some sort of equilibrium. One be-co-me-d with the Other."
At first, as a baby, I imitated and responded to what my family thought was best, whether I liked it or not. Then, around the time of puberty, I created what i thought I needed to distinguish myself as a personality. I wanted my own identity. My own identity, however, was merely an extension of what I had been taught I oughta be as the son of my parents, the brother of my siblings. Then, I got married and divorced a couple of times, and there was that business of being a husband and father, which required the proof of the pudding, and I failed miserably to everyone's disappointment.
All along the way there was something else going on that, at first, and then intermittently, intervened with the promised results of the projects called for by the world around me. Nothing I was ever taught or learned provided any satisfaction for my understanding of the true meaning of life.
Ben came over for a visit, and so I don't remember the point of what I was writing above. Something much better happened. We pushed and we fussed about a bunch of stuff that don't really matter, and then he quoted some lines he created in response to one of my old poems.
I interrupted him and asked him about the lines. I cranked up the word editor and started writing down what he said. He kept telling me he had it written down in an e-mail post, and I had to let him retrieve it from his Yahoo account. I refused. I tried to force him to remember it. He did remember most of it, and then I let him find the post on his Yahoo account. It contained some of my poetry he had used to get cranked up, but then he created his own lines.
I deleted everything but what he had written himself, and we put together his poem like it was a real stand alone poem. Here is his first poem:
The Musings Of Fools
They are special tools,
these musings of fools,
the thoughts in our lives we amass.
the moments of gold
the stories not told
the trials and struggles that pass.
the joy and the pain
become one and the same
and follow wherever I go.
Ben J. Miller
July 7, 2008
He's gotta have something of his own. His coal miner father has wood carvings displayed in the Smithsonian Institute. He comes from the blood. I have a painting he created. He gave to me merely because I admired it. I think his poetry is going to fulfill a lifetime desire to stand on his own two artistic feet. His poetry will only be a part of it, but it will be the crowning glory of it.
I made a big deal of it. I copied it by hand on a matte sheet. I know he'll frame it. He's gonna hang it for everybody to see in his wife's restaurant she keeps as an aside. I am so very pleased for him. His wife is going to act like a fool over how brilliant her husband is. Why would she not? It's the truth.
Ben came over for a reason. He brought me an article on Vitamin D. I've not been taking nearly enough according to that article. I'm reading more about Vitamin D deficiency at this web site:
http://www.peoplespharmacy.org/index.asp
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
