I'm sitting here in a school library while the significant other, employed by the school system, does some equipment installation.  It's been a whirlwind week -- capitalized with my maiden voyage into an assignment in my new job.  I totally freaked out, as I usually do when confronted with a ginormous RFP questionnaire.  It wouldn't have been so bad had I not spent SUNDAY prepping for the project that went to someone else.  Quickly things settled down, but it was non stop -- so very little ME TIME at work.  That's okay. 

Finally catching up on some personal writing projects.  The writing team I'm with revised our non-fiction book proposal and now that is off to the agent for another round of submissions to editors.  Not sure what's going to happen there, if anything.  The book-buying audience continues to dwindle, and with the economy sucky as it is, not sure how much buying will be going on yet this fall.  We do have a solid list of writers for our project, there's timely interest in our topic, so 'conditions are favorable.'  We'll have to see.

Next up, the mystery.  There is a mystery writing seminar at the Loft this fall, and I need to be ready with a pitch I'm sure.  If the VAST audience to this blog has comments or thoughts on readying a pitch -- where to look for inspiration or easily swipable pitch material, let me know.  Think mystery. 

Thanks!

“Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.”

I  realize not much is going on here lately.  I apologize to the huge audience following me. 

Watched 'aqua' streaming by, all the innumerable thoughts on people's minds, everyone looking for a someone to listen but too busy talking.  Does the internet sap our  ability to be compassionate with so much easy access to self-express?

            Berry watched O’Rourke, her recently divorced husband, drive away from the house, now hers.  He was driving away in the banana-yellow Opel, the color she had specifically picked out, but that didn’t matter to the judge.  She would have preferred to have the car, but that would have meant remaining married to O’Rourke.  There really was no other option.

Her kid brother Clint finished changing the locks and took his leave as well. 

            “You’ll be alright, wontcha?” he said to her has he closed his toolbox.

            “Sure, no problem,” she said looking away.   She was tired of being monitored by everyone, those who cared out of empathy or duty were not helping her at all.  She nearly snapped at the grocery store cashier when the girl chipperly suggested she “have a good day” just like she’d said to every other customer that day, Berry was sure.

            She didn’t want to be told to have a good day, even if it was offered up as part of the social transaction that came with her receipt and change.   Berry was tired of meanlingless rituals like cashier chit-chat, breakroom weather reports, and marriages.  They were all robotic exchanges, and therefore completely unnecessary. 

But this is how things go the day your ex-husband moves out.  

            Clint handed Berry her new keys, and left her to slip them on to the macramé key chain one of O’Rourke’s students had given him the previous Christmas.  O’Rourke got a lot of loot that way, he was popular with his high school journalism students.  Berry had always gotten first choice from his haul, of course that wouldn’t be happening again, now that they’d split. 

            Berry shuffled off to her kitchen after Clint left, and needing to do something, she brewed some herbal tea, but regretted her choice when she opened the cupboard.  O’Rourke had left almost all of the coffee mugs he’d been given over the years, but the tea was brewed and Berry wasn’t going to waste it so she selected the least obnoxious of the “#1 Teacher” mugs filling the cabinet and sat in her kitchen. 

            The doorbell rang.  “Clint must have forgotten something,” she thought, but instead of Clint there were two clean-shaven young men, dressed in dark suits, holding out pamphlets and smiling.

“I suppose you’re here to save me?” Berry asked, sipping her herbal tea. 

“Actually, we wondered, miss, if you’re at all concerned where the world is headed?”

            She realized she wasn’t dressed for company, her seersucker smock top was smudged with grime from helping O’Rourke pack, and her blue-jeans were torn at the knees.  But when had she dressed for company. 

“Come in, please,” she heard herself say automatically, in much the same voice as the cashier had used earlier that day.  “Can I offer you some tea?” she went on to say, wondering if her voice sounded robotic. 

            “Thank you but no, miss.  We really want to concentrate on Bible prophecy, and how it relates to today’s world.  Times are decadent, there is no question, wouldn’t you agree?”

            O’Rourke used to delight in engaging door-to-door proselytizers.  Berry wondered why he bothered, both she and O’Rourke had long abandoned the churches of their youth, he the Lutheran, she the Catholic.  But this was the day that O’Rourke left, she was still trying to grasp hold of what had happened.  Maybe these Jehovah’s Witnesses could explain how it was O’Rourke managed to have an affair with the homely school district administrator, an affair she believed was as arbitrary as he claimed it was.  O’Rourke swore he still loved Berry and Berry couldn’t contradict that he sounded absolutely sincere. 

            Her problem was that she believed O’Rourke, but had lost her faith in love, and so fell away from that religion her marriage had built over most of the last decade.   The marriage began in the Summer of Love (how cliché!), peaked around the time the last G.I.s exited off that Hanoi rooftop, and fell apart conveniently now, the bicentennial year.   O’Rourke had scoffed about how commercial the bicentennial was, how there seemed to be nothing close to real about it.   Meanwhile, his affair, based on nothing substantial either, flourished. 

            “Scripture is pretty clear.  In Matthew, Jesus said “There will be food shortages and earthquakes in one place after another. All these things are a beginning of pangs of distress.”

            “Pangs of distress….really?”   Berry had pangs of distress several times a day, so this got her attention.  She felt her throat ache and instinctively reached for the pack of cigarettes and matches she kept by the door.

            “Yes, miss.  But Christians can remain untainted by moral corruption, in these times.”

            Berry lit a cigarette, then asked if the Witnesses minded if she smoked, ushering them to accompany her to the front stoop.  Then she remembered that O’Rourke was gone now, that meant she could smoke in the house whenever she wanted.  It was no longer necessary to take her Virginia Slims outside.

            So she decided to conveniently send them off.

“Thank you for talking to me,” Berry said, holding out a hand to receive their pamphlet, Learn How to Live Forever.  “Have a nice day!” 

She went back inside and closed the door on the two nice young men and returned with her tea and her cigarette to the kitchen.  She spread the pamphlet on the table and looked at it but couldn’t focus on the words. 

She didn’t want to learn how to live forever if days were long, hard and unforgiving like this one.  She put her cigarette out in the dregs of the tea and tossed the pamphlet in the cupboard with all the rest of O’Rourke’s cups, where it seemed to belong. 

She closed the cabinet door and made a few notes on the grocery list:  “teacups” and “ashtray”. 

            And so began her life without O’Rourke.

Since I have invented this persona, the Lucid Sleeper, (because Lucid Dreamer was taken), I've pondered what "Lucid Sleeper" might mean, now that I've gone and invented it in reinventing myself.

The source, Wikipedia, provides a definition of a lucid dream:

A lucid dream, also known as a conscious dream, is a dream in which the person is aware that he or she is dreaming while the dream is in progress. 

Lucid dreaming can be very useful to those of us suffering from the occasional nightmare.  Because if you can realize the nightmare is only a dream, then you can act in ways, in the dream, to control the situation and possibly even wake up.

Thus, in a lucid dream, you insert consciousness into a less-than-conscious state.  It is not exactly the same as fully waking up, but you can achieve that if it helps.

That would mean that lucid sleeping is probably analogous to the way most of us spend our waking hours.  We are inserting semi- or un-consciousness into our conscioius life.  Our lives are something like a zombie state where we are conscious, yet stumbling through life half-awake.  And why do we do that?  Is life so overstimulating that we need to tune out?  Why?  To survive?

Or is it an act of laziness.

Lucid_sleeper will examine this further.