--JUST BE GRATEFUL

 

…After getting feedback—(“I have to honest.  I didn’t like this at all”) I spent yesterday reworking the beginning of a new novel.  I hope it’s turning out better.  I think it is.

Meanwhile, friends on Facebook were coming up with witty stuff:

 -Son: Mom, you know how you say you want to be a princess on your birthday?

-Me: Yeah?
-Son: That's how you choose the next guy you love. The one who treats you like a princess on your birthday and all the rest of the days too

-Somebody on the radio just said "I'd rather eat chicken nuggets than scorpions."

-Holy sheeite! When did picking up a dime I dropped on the floor become an advanced yoga posture?

-Liam has asked ever since our bear-sighting if the bear is going to be my boyfriend. I think this says a lot about my type. Big. Dark. Lumbering. Eats a lot. Sleeps a lot.

-When the guard at the post office mumbled handsome as I passed, I was embarrassed, but thrilled. Then I realized he said, have a good one.

-"Owen, you need to stop hitting people."
-(Owen in crying voice): "I just hit people because I want them to fight me but they never do!"
-"Why do you want people to fight you?"
-Owen (still in crying voice) “I want people to fight me so that I can prove my strength.”
(Still crying) "I want people to fight me because I want to prove my strength."
-I thought about texting an ex-boyfriend last night: "remember when I barfed and then you stayed with me until I fell asleep?" But I didn't want to make him miss me more than he surely does

-One of my student's sentences: "I look forward to battering myself." Fish and chips anyone?

-Real thing I just did on a dating site:
Guy: Truth? Or dare?
Me: Get off the planet
 

…Lastly, here are some things I like on a Wednesday:

 “The role of the writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.” Anais Nin

 “Great dancers are not great because of their technique, they are great because of their passion.” Martha Graham

“A good photograph is knowing where to stand.” Ansel Adams

“To create one’s world in any of the arts takes courage.” Georgia O’Keeffe

“Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say, and say it hot.” D. H. Lawrence

“There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.” Willa Cather

“I found that the sunshine in New Mexico could do almost anything with one: make one well if one felt ill, or change a dark mood and lighten it.  It entered into one’s deepest places and melted the thick, slow densities.  It made one feel good.  That is, alive.” Mabel Dodge Luhan

 

 

--EVERYBODY’S GOT A BREAKING POINT

  

                                                               Haiku on Skin

 

            She wants it to be yesterday, last year, the night of their anniversary, with the citrus taste of nectarines dripping from his lips to hers, the night outside their hotel window revealing a shy, gunmetal gray moon, their bare legs roped together loosely.  He had been as gentle as she’d guessed he would be, boyish almost in the furtive way his hands roamed her skin, drawing out swaths of goose flesh, making up haikus on the spot, writing the words across her ribs and belly.

            The morning after, they were going to try the French place for breakfast but once there he realized he’d forgotten his wallet.  Back at their room, he encountered the thief who would scuffle with him, who eventually flung her husband out the window.

            Now, she brings in a bowl of nectarine slices, their sweet scent enveloping the room.

            He hadn’t remembered anything prior to the fall, not that night, not even that she’s his wife.

            Getting into bed, she says, “Scoot over a little.  Come closer.”

            “Why?” he asks.

            She bites off a chunk of nectarine and dabs it across his lips, same as she has done almost every night.

            “What are you doing?”

            Naked flat-backed on the mattress, she takes his hand and splays his fingers apart. 

“Write a haiku on my skin,” she says.

“I can’t write a haiku.  I don’t even know what that is.” 

His eyes are dull gray dimes, yet she’s not ready to give up.

“It’s easy, just three short lines,” she says.

“This is crazy.”

“Come on.  Try,” she says, leading his fingers to flesh.  “I’ll help.”

           

--WE ARE WHO WE ARE

 

…For years, blogspot wouldn’t let me fix the broken links (online magazine sites that had gone defunct) but then the other day the spell was lifted and so I spent quite a few hours deleting things and adding new pieces.  There should be around seven hundred stories here under Words In Print and I think if you click on anyone of them it’ll take you right to the story.

…Thanks for reading my blog.  I don’t know who you are, but I’m grateful.  We’re nearing a quarter million views, which is kind of cool.

…I’ve had a surge of things published lately, but that’ll be it for a while.

Here are some:

http://www.theflashfictionpress.org/2016/08/31/the-other-side-of-envy/

https://sicklitmagazine.com/2016/07/13/poems-len-kutz/

http://eternalremedy.com/i-promise/

https://issuu.com/oppoet/docs/kuntz-kamali

https://spelkfiction.com/2016/08/22/door-without-a-window/

http://www.cheappoplit.com/home/2016/7/12/eggs-len-kuntz

https://eunoiareview.wordpress.com/2016/08/14/every-single-piece/

…I hope you have a great weekend.  It’s sunny here and I hope it is sunny wherever you are as well.

“I do albums and, like a fool, I listen to what people say about them.  The terrible thing is it puts you off our own stuff.” Paul McCartney

 “You may be talented, but you’re not Kanye West.” Kanye West

 “No one get a free pass from heartbreak, discouragement, and the dull, weary thud that comes from asking, Did I waste my time.” Rob Bell

“And that’s when we began writing our own songs…We knew we had something; you could feel it, the hairs stood up on our arms, it just felt so different.  We didn’t know what it was, but we liked it.  I just came up with this riff for ‘Black Sabbath.’  I played ‘dom-dom-dommm.’  And it was like: that’s it!  We built the song from there.  As soon as I played that first riff we went: ‘Oh God, that’s really great.  But what is it?  I don’t know.’” Rony Iommi

“I can’t dance like Usher.  I can’t sing like Beyonce.  I can’t write songs like Elton John.  But we can do the best with what we’ve got.  And so that’s what we do.  We just go for it.” Chris Martin, Coldplay

“I like nonsense.  It wakes up the brain cells.” Dr. Seuss

 

 

 

--AIN’T IT FUNNY HOW THE PAST WON’T LET SOMETHING LIE?

 

 

 

                                                        Ghosts in the House

 

            After I saw Mom kissing my Aunt on the mouth, I learned how to be careful.

            But there were snakes in my bed, ghosts hanging in the hall, booby traps in the cereal.  The mirrors snickered at me.

            My Aunt liked me too much.  She had grasshopper eyes and busy hands.  Bath time was slippery Hide-N-Go-Seek and no fun at all.

            “You can at least try a little,” my Aunt said.

            I told her, “No,” but she didn’t care.

            Mother had an arsenal—belts, chains, an egg beater.  She left rocks scattered in the corner of the living room and if I blinked too fast my penance was kneeling on those rocks with my hands upraised for an hour.  Failure to make it the whole sixty minutes meant Armageddon.

            My Aunt liked to watch, tittering like a happy chipmunk.  She liked to watch other times, too.

            “Just pretend I’m a ghost,” she’d say while I was peeing or doing the other.  Often she’d look between my legs, leer and say, “You’re just like your father down there.”

            Dad was a ghost, too, not gossamer, but rather made up of a million tiny needles held together by cigarette smoke.  Sometimes he shape-shifted, becoming one of the snakes in my bed.

            At school, I asked the teacher if I could please make the classroom my bedroom and live there.  She chuckled so hard and said, “I didn’t know you were funny.”

            At home, I kept falling through trapdoors, kept getting mired in quicksand.  Each time I did, Mom through a slap and pointed out the Job had it much worse and he never bitched.

            There are a lot of ways to realign your vision—lower your eyelids, close them, blink, go cross-eyed.  I learned them all.

 

 

 

--WHY DO WE KEEP KILLING EACH OTHER?



                                                            Animal Kingdom

 

            Yesterday they were naked on the sofa, the panther and the bear, watching reruns of Animal Kingdom in the glow of gauzy lamplight.  But by nine the moon had shifted, betraying me, and they became my parents again.

            Today Mother is a panther once more--foamy mouth, fangs, onyx eyes with specks of scarlet.

            We form a broken circle around clothes scattered on my sister’s bedroom floor.

            The panther tells the bear, “See, she’s a pig,” and hands him a leather belt embossed with antelope, fawns and bucks, the buckle silver moose antlers.

            Light squeezes through the ceiling seams like sprockets of yellow pine needles, reminding me that it is still daylight, that there are more hours to bear, that agony is a promise to be met.

            On the wall the Indian clock doesn’t budge, neither long hand nor short hand, as Pocahontas closes her coffee-colored eyes.

            The bear’s breath smells of oaky bourbon.  He’s woozy and sways as dust particles dance around him, some settling in his fur.

            The panther tells the bear to focus, get on with it, and so the belt becomes a cobra. 

Sweat flicks across my cheek.  My sister screams.  The cobra won’t stop striking until it’s someone else’s turn, then someone else’s.

            After the mad circus is complete, we each lay in our bunks licking wounds, holding breath, dreaming of open pastures, flat plains with plenty of room to run.

           

 

--YOU COULD READ ME ANYTHING

 

…On the way to Taos, NM I read Rob Bell’s book, “How To Be Here.”  It really moved me, even though a lot of what he has to say is stuff we already know, or more importantly, should know.
Here are some random excerpts of my favorite bits (I hope you find some inspiration in these, some, if not all):
 
How we respond to what happens to us—especially the painful, excruciating things that we never wanted and we have no control over—is a creative act.

 We have power, more power than we realize, power to decide that we are going to make something good out of this.  When you ask what new and good thing is going to come out of even this, you have taken something that was out of your control and reframed it as another opportunity to take part in the ongoing creation of the world.

Are you breathing?

Are you here?
Did you just take a breath?
Are you about to take another?
Do you have a habit of regularly doing this?
Gift.
Gift.
Gift.

Suffering and loss have this extraordinary capacity to alert and awaken us to the gift that is life.

Boredom is lethal because it reflects a static, fixed view of the world—a world that is finished.

It can be intimidating or it can be liberating, because if everybody starts with a blank page, then everybody starts from the same place.

There is a difference between craft and success.

Craft is when you have a profound sense of gratitude that you even get to do this.

Craft is when you relish the details.

Craft is your awareness that all the hours you’re putting in are adding up to something, that they’re producing in you skill and character and substance.  Craft is when you meet up with someone else who’s serious about her craft and you can talk for hours about the subtle nuances and acquired wisdom of the work.  Craft is when you’re humbled because you know that no matter how many years you get to do this, there will always be room to learn and grow.

Success promises something it can’t deliver.  As soon as you reach your goal, success creates a new one, which creates anxieties and stresses.

Success is when you’re seduced into thinking that your joy and satisfaction are not here but there—somewhere in the future, at some moment you accomplish X or you win Y.
Success can never get enough.

It makes your head spin, because you get that thing you were desperately working for, for all those years, and when you get it, you realized that it isn’t what you thought it was.

No one get a free pass from heartbreak, discouragement, and the dull, weary thud that comes from asking, Did I waste my time?

Far too often, we don’t start because we can’t get our minds around the entire thing.  We don’t take the first step because we can’t figure out the seventeenth step.

But you don’t have to know the seventeenth step.  You only have to know the first step.  Because the first number is always 1.
Start with 1.
It’s too overwhelming otherwise.  It’s too easy to be caught up in endless ruminations: What if Step 4 doesn’t work?  Or What if there isn’t money for Step 11?  Or What if people don’t like the results of Step 6?
You start with your 1, and then you suspend judgment on what you’re doing, because you don’t know what you have when you start.
No one does.

When you are constantly judging what you’re doing, you aren’t here.  You aren’t present.  You are standing outside of your life, looking in, observing. 

“And that’s when we began writing our own songs…We knew we had something; you could feel it, the hairs stood up on our arms, it just felt so different.  We didn’t know what it was, but we liked it.  I just came up with this riff for ‘Black Sabbath.’  I played ‘dom-dom-dommm.’  And it was like: that’s it!  We built the song from there.  As soon as I played that first riff we went: ‘Oh God, that’s really great.  But what is it?  I don’t know.’” Rony Iommi

 Stop thinking about shit that ain’t happenin’.

 When we’re young and we want something, we do whatever it takes.

Somewhere along the way in becoming adults, it’s easy to lose this potent mix of exploration and determination.  We settle.  We decide this is as good as it gets.  We comfort ourselves with, It could be worse.

Risk sometimes leads to failure, and failure is overrated.

Failure is simply another opportunity to learn.

You want some risk in your life.

Risk is where the life is.

Risk keeps thing interesting.  It wakes us up, it gives us a sense that we’re alive and breathing and doing something with our lives.

The first thing you have to do is throw yourself into whatever it is you’re doing.

Throwing yourself into it begins with being grateful that you even have something to throw yourself into.

Sometimes we don’t throw ourselves into it because we believe the small things are beneath us.

Or it may have been done or said by someone else.  That’s a distinct possibility.  It may have been done or said before.

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel because you don’t have to invent anything.

Sometimes we don’t throw ourselves into it because we put ourselves out there in the past and got criticized or shot down.

The actor Mark Ruffalo went to six hundred auditions before he got his first part.  Six hundred No’s before the first Yes.

Find me one person who’s doing something interesting in the world who hasn’t felt the hot sting of a No.

When we don’t throw ourselves completely into it and he hold back our best efforts because of what happened in the past, we are letting the past decide the future.

We have to surrender the outcomes because we cannot control how people are going to respond to us and our work in the world.

The satisfaction is found in knowing you’re here, you’re alive, and you get to make something with your life.

No one has ever done this before. 

No one has ever been you before.

“You may be talented, but you’re not Kanye West.” Kanye West

“I can’t dance like Usher.  I can’t sing like Beyonce.  I can’t write songs like Elton John.  But we can do the best with what we’ve got.  And so that’s what we do.  We just go for it.” Chris Martin, Coldplay

It’s exciting to keep moving.

We have this morning, this day, and aren’t we lucky?  All we have is today.

There is power in the details, power in this moment, power in treating this meal, this book, this bird outside the window…treating it as a sacred gift that it is.

“The meaning of awe is to realize that life takes place under wide horizons, horizons that range beyond the span of an individual life or even the life of a nation, a generation, or an era.  Awe enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple; to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.” Abraham Joshua Heschel

A friend of mine often asks, What is lacking at this moment?  Because the answer is usually “nothing.”

After I suffered a concussion that later left me in a fixed state where everything slowed down and I saw everything in a clear way, I learned that my life—my average, ordinary, routine, everyday life—has infinite depth and dimension and meaning and significance.

I learned that the present moment, with all its pressure and heartbreak and work and struggle and tension and questions and concerns, is way more interesting and compelling and mysterious and even enjoyable than I had ever imagined.

I want you to learn to live like you’re not missing a thing, like your eyes are wide open, fully awake to the miraculous nature of your own existence.

I came here today to tell you that I can see the ocean now.
Do you see the ocean right in front of you?
Stand back and see that person you love from a slight distance.
Like you never have before.
Like you’re meeting him for the first time.
Like you’re getting a tour of your life and this is our first encounter with her.
Like I just pointed him out and said to you, This is __________.

 

  

--THIS ONE DAY IS NOT LIKE THE OTHER
 

…In Taos, at the workshop, we were told to go deep with our writing.  I usually do that, but while there I went to places I’d forgotten about.  It was very emotional digging up things I’d somehow buried.  But it felt safe, and I was with people who protected me and so I wrote and wrote about things that happened when I was a boy.

This is one of the pieces that came out of it:

                       

                                                            Summer of Smoke

            It was a summer of smoke, the summer my brothers stole cigarettes and made me light up with them until I puked, the summer forest fires shrieked and crackled in the distance, swallowing an entire valley, the summer our garage burnt down to cinders and four charred posts, the summer I turned nine and learned that, for some people, monsters are very real.

            It was the summer Sis claimed Dad had been raping her for years.

            Mom didn’t believe her, of course she didn’t.

            Mealtime became a kind of silent purgatory, all of us silent mimes.  Only the plates spoke.  When we could, we buried our eyes under made up manhole covers.

            Mom and Dad never stopped smoking, leafy ash curling off the ends of their Marlboros like gnarled fingers beckoning you their way, smoke genies floating in the whorls of Mom’s hair curled high like an out of control fern, some slaking out of her hairy nostrils, riding the ridges of her cat-eyed glasses, making her squint and scowl.  Dad, seated beside her at the front of the table, with an open mouth full of smoke, a gray trapdoor, his flattop haircut a hundred tiny needles.

            One day Sis and I escaped our parents and brothers and hid in the hills beyond the trailer lot where we lived.

            We watched the forest fire move in orange-red sheets down the mountainside fast as the wind, merciless, almost liquid in flight.  The air was as thick as smudged cotton, tasted like tarry briquettes, and burned going down.

            We sat beneath an evergreen whose branches danced with the breeze, the limbs rustling, trying to relay some urgent message we already knew.

            “I hope it gets us,” Sis said.

            “No you don’t.  Besides, it’s too far away.”

            “Everything is,” Sis said, her last words that day.

            When we stood up, I took her palm in mine and held I as we made our way back to hell.

            Now, all these years later, as I escort her down the aisle, I give her hand a little squeeze.  Everyone’s eyes are on the bride next to me.

            He’s not here.

            She’s not here.

            Everything is safe.  Everything is good.  It’s almost perfect.