more normal than not

Some people might say that repetition is the death of creativity.

Look at me, for example.  I get up every morning at about the same time, go downstairs, put on a pot of water for the coffee, feed the cat who’s mewling at the door, pour half a coffee cup of orange juice to take my three vitamins with, go upstairs to start writing this blog, run downstairs when the tea kettle whistles, make my coffee and …after putting 1/2 an inch of half and half in my coffee cup that I used to drink my orange juice (I rinse it out after the orange juice), I go back upstairs to wait for the coffee to be ready to drink…and I write this blog.

Every. Single. Freaking. Day.

Unless…I’m running ( I took a short break for a cold that featured a weird metallic hacking cough).  If I’m running I do all that after I go out for my run.

I won’t bore you with the details of my running preparation.

So…I’m a creature of habit.  I don’t count my cheese puffs like Raymond in that Tom Cruise movie…but I’m almost as bad as that.

Always the same.

I was thinking about repetition the other day, and I thought of my father again.

I’ve mentioned that my mother was “physically challenged” the last 15 years of her life.  (I almost used the phrase “an invalid”…we’re so sensitive about what’s politically correct, calling each other out for phrases that might slander or irritate certain groups…careful with our words…but unaware of what we’re really saying when we say things like “invalid”.  It’s not like we went to the library to hear them say, “Would you like me to VALIDATE that parking ticket for you?”….”No, thankyou…I’m an INVALID…doesn’t work for me.  Thanks, anyway…” INVALID?  What the heck? It’s kind of like certain “groups” are outside our awareness of what might be an insensitive thing to say….weird. )

Anyway, she needed help sometimes.

My father worked for ATT at a facility about 8 miles from our house.  He worked it out with his boss that he could take a longer lunch break so he could come home and help my mother…and then make up the time at the end of the day.

Here’s where the repetitive part comes in.

For, what?….12 years or so, I guess…he would drive home, help mom, make sure she was alright and had what she needed until we got home from school, and then he’d make a bologna and cheese sandwich, grab a coke out of the refrigerator…and head back to work.

I think he ate his sandwich on the trip back so he’d be ready to do whatever he did for ATT when he got back to the office.

Every day during the week, he’d make the drive home and do his routine.

It says in the Bible that there’s no greater love than being willing to lay down your life for a friend.

I used to think that was for soldiers or people who could jump in front of a bullet for someone.

I thought it meant saving a life by giving up your own.

I thought it meant actually dying for someone else.

I understand it a different way now.

Nothing is heroic in the day-to-day.  It’s just our lives…it’s what we do between breaths. We don’t see the heroic until we’ve had a chance to distance ourselves a little.

A bologna sandwich is not a dramatic image of heroism.

It’s just part of a routine.

It’s part of a long-term routine done out of necessity and consideration…and love.

I have a deep and everlasting respect for every “caregiver” I meet out in the world.  That’s a beautiful thing for people to do for each other.

Maybe waking up in a different country every week, picking up local habits and languages as you go…eating new foods and dealing only with the unfamiliar…maybe that’s creative. Being an unstructured nomad with nobody to think about but yourself has to be creative…it sure sounds like a creative way to live, anyway.

I’m sure it is.  It has to be creative.

Never retracing your steps is one way to be creative…it’s always a new thing.

But the constancy of a loving caregiver…that’s what really impresses me.

Maybe I’ll eat a bologna sandwich for lunch today.

And…maybe I’ll do it again tomorrow.

Who knows?

Monkey has a new tool.

For 15 years, we heated with wood.  We heated only with wood.

In the morning, we got a fire going in the wood stove and then waited for the house to warm up.  It was cold in the morning and we waited to be comfortable again.

It took some effort.

Waiting was the easy part.  Once the wood had gotten to the point where we could fit it in the wood stove…once it had been cut and split…we were on easy street.

Unless the wood was still a little green and it was hard to get lit, just getting a fire going was easy compared with splitting and stacking.

A couple of years ago, we bought a propane wall heater to supplement the wood heat.  It’s still a pretty simple system…when the woodstove goes out and it starts to get chilly, the propane heater kicks on.

Simple.

I have friends…just about everyone I know, really…who, if I asked them how they heat their homes, would say, “Sure, I do. There’s a thing on the wall that you tell what number you want it to do.  The big number makes it hot, and the small number makes it less hot.  If it’s the summer, and you get too hot, you make sure the thing says cool on it, and then the big number makes it hotter…and the small number makes it cooler. You always have to remember to flick the switch or it will just keep getting hotter instead of cooler, though.  You have to keep your wits about you when it comes to flicking switches.”

Simple.

Actually, most of my friends are geniuses or close to it…so they do understand things on a deeper level than “flick the switch”.  I’m just being silly. They know better than that.

But the “genius” part is true…I guess it’s one of those “birds of a feather” things…I seem to know a lot of geniuses.

Anyway, we cut and split a lot of wood.  There is a lot of wood around here.  It rains a good bit, and the trees must love water, because there are trees everywhere.

Finding wood to cut and split isn’t hard.

It’s a pretty good deal.

If you’re able to cut and split wood, you can heat your house.

Simple.

I spent a lot of years whacking logs with a splitting maul.

That tears you up.  Holy Smokes…it’s a workout.

Shoulders, wrists…everything takes a beating. It gets you in shape…but it really puts you through your paces to split a couple of cords of wood by hand.

That’s why I’m so in love with this splitter that a friend let me borrow.

I guess that a paradigm is a worldview…a way of looking at things, an explanation for what goes on.  I guess that’s what a paradigm is.

This splitter gives me a new “wood paradigm”.

When the hardest thing is lifting the knotty chunk onto the rail/bed/receiver (what’s it called?  The part?) of the splitter and then moving the handle to let the magic happen, that’s a small miracle to me.

I could be a small ape dancing around the what? Obelisk? Monolith?  That thing in the movie 2001 that freaked those monkeys out at the beginning…that big black thing.  It makes me so happy to dance around the magic wood machine. It is magic to see it push through the knottiest, burliest hunk of unsplittable oak like it was butter that required a beefy hydraulic tool to slice.

That’s a good thing.

You know?

Anyway, it gives me such joy to let a machine that’s stronger than me do the work I used to do with sheer brawn.

I am enamored with this splitter.

I can’t go back to the farm… now that I’ve seen Paree.

But what am I going to do with all my free time?

I guess I’ll just have to make the pile of wood bigger.

And…bigger.

I have a friend who spent some time out in Los Angeles.

When he talked about how it was out there, he mentioned that he couldn’t get over how the weather was always the same.  He didn’t like the weather being perfect all the time.

I think I remember talking about the traffic.

I’m not really sure what else we talked about. It was a while ago.

Maybe we talked about an earthquake or something.  I don’t really remember.

One thing I do remember him mentioning was how many beautiful women there were out in Hollywood.

I remember that.

But he said that you couldn’t really talk to any of them.

I guess it only went skin deep out in Hollywood.

Maybe it goes even more “only skin deep” out in Hollywood than other places.

I guess the folks out there are pretty good at buffing the surface.

Botoxed and lifted, nipped and tucked…the folks out in Hollywood keep it together any way they can.

Polished until they rub off all the good parts.  Polished until we wonder if anything is real anymore.

And that becomes our standard…some Photoshopped image, airbrushed and re-digitalized to “perfection”…some icon that we can use as a yardstick for our own perceived shortcomings, wondering, “why don’t I measure up? Maybe that’s what people want?”

It’s kind of nuts, really.

Now, I don’t have any need to follow some “Hollywood trend”. I don’t need to wear shoes without shoelaces, or buy a better watch, or inject anything to make it smoother.

I don’t need to take a bunch of “selfies” in the bathroom mirror.

Those are Hollywood trends, right?

I may be a little behind on my trends.

I might be missing something.

When I think about “perfection”….or what we think perfection is supposed to be…I can’t help but think that it’s really the “burrs” that make us most interesting…and those are the things that we’re worried about getting rid of a lot of the time.

We need an honest happy accident in the beauty department.

We need someone like Marlo Thomas who’s “Free to be Me”.

(Remember that book?  “Free to be Me”?)

We need something that we can trust.

Between steroid fueled home run kings and all the nose jobbed and implanted fakes…and those are just the dudes…it’s hard to know what we can take at face value anymore.

It is kind of jarring to be confronted with physical reality now if it veers off from what we’ve come to expect.

If I could jump down out of the saddle that my “high horse” is wearing for a minute, I should mention that when I was watching the movie about the trapper that I wrote about a couple of days ago, I did notice that when the Asian lady who I think was playing an American Indian lady (why do they do that?) was in the right light… I noticed some wrinkles.

She lives in the frozen north…she’s going to have some wrinkles.

But I noticed.  It didn’t matter…but I noticed.

Of course, the trapper was a roadmap of wrinkles…but he was a dude so I cut him some slack.  I didn’t notice as much with him. It didn’t make me think, “Look at the wrinkles on that grizzled old dude!”

We suspect that things will be good when we get all the rough edges taken care of…but that’s what makes us interesting.

All these “burrs” are pretty fascinating.

Leave the burrs alone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUTkZ63dHiY

Looking up Youtube videos with “wilderness” as a search term, I came across this movie.

Watching it, I realized just how long I’ve been obsessed with this kind of lifestyle.

( I have “smarty pantsed” friends who right now are probably tweeting something like, “What?! What kind of lifestyle?! Sitting in front of a computer watching bad videos about some dude living in the woods?! What?!!#youngbilbo” ….I don’t really know how twitter works yet…so that’s the best I could do.  What is a hashtag, anyway?)

It’s been a long time that I’ve lived under the umbrella of a “Jeremiah Johnson” type fantasy.

I’ve thought about living “way out” for a long time. I wonder what fostered that idea?

When you have a family, your priorities change.

That’s a good thing…I could think of a lot of wacky places I could drag them.  Into the woods, up to Norway…some Italian villa to refurbish a cheap old house…some other place that might make things weird for a while.

My head is often full of “thoughts of away”.

And “away” never takes place in an urban setting.  It’s always out in an area that might be just a big green space on the map. I don’t have any interest in living in a city.

But, when you think about it, maybe a “grand adventure” might be the kindest thing I could do for all of us?

( I’m not the only one in the family with an interest in adventure…Jenny has a lot of ideas about interesting ways to live, ideas about new experiences.)

This movie is kind of long…but see if you can stick with it long enough to hear the Leonard Cohen song.  Who would have thought that Leonard Cohen would have a song in a Canadian movie?

The thing about a “consistent obsession” is that it probably starts out as a dream, and then over the years turns into a marker for what you haven’t done yet…or maybe a reminder of what you might never do.

Maybe a “consistent obsession” becomes a “realistic interest” at some point.

“That’s not very realistic now, is it?” is a real dream killer.

It seems like I get more realistic about things as I get older….like “the more I know, the less I do” or something.

Maybe that’s what keeps us alive when we get a little older and start to “slow down”.  It’s probably a survival mechanism to get a little “wiser” about what could happen when we jump off the cliff.

I took a bus ride from Minneapolis to Spokane when I was 18.  I’d spent the summer working on a crew that put up big power line towers in Minnesota…and this was a trip to visit family at the end of the summer.

I sat next to a college student on part of the trip and we talked about the homesteading act up in Alaska.

It might have been the last year it was still in effect…1978.  I can’t remember when they stopped giving away land up in Alaska.

I was pretty obsessed with the idea of homesteading up in Alaska.

Pretty unrealistic.  I don’t think I’d ever even used a chainsaw at that point.

The only real skill I had was the ability to dream.

That counts for doodleysquat out in the woods.

I guess it’s really a blessing that I couldn’t act on every goofy dream I have…no matter how long I’ve been obsessed with it.

Being lazy and scared probably saved my life.

Our children look kind of like this.

They aren’t as dirty…and don’t usually have little braids and colorful pieces of string tied in their hair…but they look kind of like this.

Blonde and Scandinavian…blue eyes.

This little girl was found in a gypsy camp .

She was found in a Roma camp in central Greece.

Here’s the story…

Now the authorities are looking for her parents.  According to the news reports, she only speaks Roma…so she must have been with the gypsies for a while.

It is such a cliché that “you might be stolen by the gypsies”.

“You better watch out…”

But apparently, it really does happen.

I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a gypsy caravan in our “neck of the woods”.  It’s not something that I’ve ever wondered or worried about.

But I can see why a little blonde kid would be appealing to a bunch of gypsies.  I understand the appeal.

We like them.

We love ours.

I just don’t think I’ve ever had any compulsion to load up the wagon and go out to steal any more of them.

Our house is small enough as it is.

This little girl must have really stood out in a camp of dark-haired Gypsies.

I guess that this is one of those situations where the more you know, the more you have to be nervous about.

I know where all of our children are. Two of them are asleep in our house. One’s away at college.

So I know that this little blonde gypsy isn’t ours, for sure.

But I haven’t thought about gypsy abduction as being something to worry about for a while now.

It hasn’t been on my “angst radar” before reading this news story.

Jenny said that there’s a meteor shower this morning…but it’s too cool and I’m still feeling a little “under the weather”…so I don’t know if I’ll go outside to try to see any rocks burning up on their way to earth.

There is so much that’s happening all the time.

It’s kind of hard to wrap your head around all of it.

I hope they find this little girl’s parents.