Perle Champion

Substitute “damn” every time you’re inclined to
write “very”; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just
as it should be.
– Mark Twain

Very damn good advice. I’m tempted to take that advice. It is easier when editing and redrafting to delete expletives and obscenities than it is to remove extraneous adjectives.

Sometimes, if I stop and read certain passages aloud, I can hear by the cadence of the words where the flow slows.

It’s a ponderous procedure, and I think using damn and its literary ken would make my rewrites go very uh damn much easier.  

It’s a dark and stormy night, and I’ve no time to write.  I’m reading. 

It’s just a bit of mind candy, and so perfect as the storm tries to batter its way through the plastic that covers my screened in balcony in winter.

I’ve a glass of wine at hand and Jazmine is purring on the back hump on this cushy loveseat that makes my balcony a sort of den.

The chanteuse of the moment, Adell’s dulcet tones waft out from the living room.

Between the covers, Lacey’s ex-lover Cole, falsely accused of murder has just tossed her over his shoulder as he escapes custody and flees Sagebursh.

Current lover, Vic is left in the dust as she revisits feelings long buried.

I’ve taken a minute to dash this off, because I must keep my resolution to post a blog a day come hell, highwater or indifference.  I will keep this resolution if not the one to lose 40 pounds.  I will, I will.

Do not misunderstand, Byerrum’s Crimes of Fashion mystery series is not a romance.  She’s in the same category as Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series or Laura Childs’s Scrapbooking Mysteries – their cozies.

All books have their place and I read almost anything.  I read around – from science fiction to science fact and theory, biography, history, mystery, fantasy and horror.  I’ll post a reading list some day soon.

But for tonight it’s Death on Heels by Ellen Byerrum that has my attention.  I’ll read it in a single sitting like a sumptuous bite of good dark chocolate.  The kind that goes so well with red wine.

So, I wish y’all as pleasant ‘a dark and stormy night’ as I’m having.  Gotta run now, Lacey’s on the tracks.

Previous published in 2008.

Some are so quick to judge badly the extravagance of an event or thing. Why?  My opinion: They envy the thing, and the people who can afford it, so they assume that holier than though posture I so hate. Give it to the poor they say. Why? Why give them a fish for a day when you can teach them to fish and feed themselves. (It’s an old adage, but true.)

It happened again on CBS Sunday Morning with Tracy Smith’s condemnation of Chanel’s celebration of Purse 2.55 with a museum currently in NYC.  I like to consider the true benefit to people in all walks of life of such a grand gesture. How many people made honest wages in this ‘extravagant’ spending? Consider how many jobs were created.

• The Architects and her staff
• Providers of the raw materials for fabrication of the structure
• Engineers who designed and orchestrated the manufacture
• Machinists who designed and ran the machines
• Workers who assembled the structure
• Artists who created the artwork for display within the structure
• Suppliers of art supplies for the artists
• Truck drivers that transported the structure and art
• Cabbies transporting visitors to the exhibit
• Maids and janitors that clean the premises night after night
• The receptions, caterers, foods, farmers, servers, etc., etc., etc. and
• And on, and on…

Consider further that every person who earns, spends, so the ripples go beyond the pool of jobs directly involved in Chanel’s Museum.

If Chanel has the money to spend extravagantly, by all means, spend it and bless you for not hording it. Give people the opportunity to earn their way and most will take it quickly and gratefully rather than put their hand out for a dole.

I often think the nay-sayers who denigrate extravagance are just jealous that they have neither the means nor the inclination for such generosity. Like the redistributionist position of presidential hopeful, BHO, they want to take from the haves of the world and give it to the have-nots, as if being wealthy is a crime and poor a virtue.

I am unemployed at the moment, but I don’t now nor will I ever want a redistribution of wealth. I want the right to create my own wealth.

© Perle Champion

Quothe Malory in the ‘before time’, in his Morte d’Arthur, “Morgan le Fay was not married, but put to school in a nunnery, where she became a great mistress of magic.”

A nunnery?  I think not.  Put to “School”, yes.  I can identify with that.  I was chosen and was put to school.  I was one in a long history of my kind – recognized at birth, sought out and nurtured by my own.  I was born in the year 2107 of Danai and Charon, an adept of the Wyse and the normal male who loved and married her against his families wishes.

On the day I was born, Nanna Seti came from The School and she talked to me mind to mind from that day forth.  My earliest memory was that soothing mind-touch, like cool water washing away all the hurtful noises.  Slowly, day by day, Nanna showed me how to build the shield that would serve me all my life.

It is her mind I remember as a warm blanket shielding me from all the thoughts from outside.  It is her teachings and stories I remember best, and her I regret most hurting in this stand I now take to take our story to the outside.  For it is she who brought me here.

I remember the day as t’were yesterday.  As I sit in this highest window of ‘The School’, in this my aerie, I remember.

I wonder if I am ready.  As I contemplate going out again into a world that views my kind askance, I am at once thrilled and not a little afraid.  I have become a mistress of magic, one of the Wyse, as have all of my kind since time out of mind.  But the time has come; the outside world beacons, and I have a plan.

no, no, no! no more t.v. – silence

off!  all the extraneous machines

and in that frightening void

let the mind fill of it own

accord.

hear again the vibrations

of the earth – gentle song

of the universe – music of the spheres

courage now, the ocean ebbs,

but it also flows

the sun sets, but it also

rises

quiet the din and venture

in

again.

can i begin again,

damn

no script at hand

I ran away today.  When the sun didn’t come,
I sat back on the sheltered balcony and watched the clouds pour forth to wash fresh my world.

The steady din of rain upon the roof of this small place is a song, one of many that I love.  The storm passes and I’m free to walk on.

All the sounds of life surround me: bird song, wind rustling dead leaves that still cling to some trees.  The surf-like sound of distant drones returning to their caves of steel.

Tomorrow I’ll be one of them,

but for today I’ve run away to some beach

somewhere that exists in a far corner of my mind.

The daily urge to write is one I must pretend some days for a while until it comes naturally – today is such a day.  I’ve committed to and will follow through posting a Blog a day for an entire year.  The challenge was posted on WordPress, but I’m simul-posting the identical post on Blogger and WordPress to see which one fares better out in the world.  Kind of like a dual experiment.

Seems all the other participants in the challenge have a focus, be it shoes, cooking, the ubiquitous weight loss, etc.  I don’t.  I’m a Jack or all master of none, but like the kid that learns to play an instrument, I’m practicing first this then that and hopefully my true love will show up.  I’m running scales that for me are words in all manner of configurations.   I’m hoping that as it did for my FB friend Ken, the daily writing will eventually lead me to my own focus.

For now it is enough just to write through to that magical place called flow, when ideas come so fast my pen’s speed is hard-pressed to get the words down.

After reading and re-reading ‘Simple Abundance’ some years back, I started sporadically keeping a ‘Gratitude Journal’ on my nightstand.

Every night before turning off the lamp, I write 5 things I’m grateful for that day. It’s like a pop-quiz at the end of the day.

I find myself grateful things as simple as the waking up to the heady smell of wet earth on a rainy day and knowing it’s Saturday and I can just lie in bed and enjoy it, yet wanting to get up anyway and be out in the midst of it.

Nothing is as fragrant as wet earth, no memory of childhood as vibrant as walking in nature rain or shine on my face.

Is this world all there is?

I find myself reflecting on the road I’ve traveled and those I’ve not. We are after all the choices we make, the roads we take, and those we don’t.  I’ve always thought I’d write my memoir and call it “The Memoirs of a Not-yet-Famous Lady”, or better yet, ‘The Memoirs of a Not-yet-Infamous Lady’.  Am I a lady? Sometimes.

I wonder, though, if this is all of it.  Is there something to the road not taken that is somehow a part of me? When the roads diverged, did a me walk on with the other decision into a parallel world?  Who is that she that is me having made other decisions.  Is her life any better or worse?  Would I like that me better?

I’ll never know, but, I wonder where she is now?  That girl, that me, the one who married John and moved on.  Where is the one who had an abortion and sans child, moved on?  Where is the rock collector faery child, who lived in dreamscapes of her own design?

Each is a piece of me.  I want to follow their trail.  I want to know where they are on their life’s path.

Did so many me’s diverge from this me that I am but a shadow.  Did I perhaps spin off a poet, too, and only kept for me a glimpsed flight of that fancy.

May Sarton said, “…if you dilute yourself too much and try to do too many things, you do none well.”  I digress.

Where is the artist never encouraged?  Is that why I only go so far then let each piece go?  Each a bubble blown from a child’s wand reduced to one little moment of brilliant iridescent color fading then to memory.

What if each was real? What if each was a real me, a me that diverged and in parallel worlds of infinite possibilities walked away.  What if a real me took each path, and my sole job on this plane is to dream – to begin each me and send her on her way.  Each a whole and complete life, and I just the dreamer with no real life of her own – destined at last to run out of dreams and paths and she’s to set upon them and at last empty to cease.

If that is the case, what now?

childhood 

tomorrow is forever in coming

if it ever comes at all

boy! tomorrow is a million miles

away, tomorrow is

my birthday

youth

it’s coming soon that day

just you wait and then

you’ll see

21 and I’ll be free, free

to go my way on my

21^st birthday

maturity

where did all the days go and

why

does the time seem to fly

seems I’d just begun

this one

and here it is again

today’s the day

my birthday…