The DNA of Running

Writing prompt this week was to respond to this picture.

I can’t run. But that’s no big deal since I can’t walk either. Nor can I sit up totally on my own or wipe my own ass. I’ve never been able to do those things though, so I’m not completely sure I miss them. I mean, wiping your own poo seems like it can have its disadvantages. Of course, lots of people, including my parents, talk to me a lot about privacy and trying to respect mine since I don’t get a lot of alone time, yadda yadda. But as with the toilet routine, I’ve never really had privacy the way they think of it, so I don’t know how to miss it. I feel that way about a lot things that other people think I should be sad about. All the things I can't do. But I don't think about it as much as it seems like everyone else does. Except for running that is. My wheelchair is mechanical and it can get fairly speedy when no one is looking; the wind blows my hair a bit and I feel the tingle of speed and its dangerousness. So I feel like I can say that while I have never run, I miss it. My body misses it.

I dream about running a lot. Well, maybe not as much as I dream about flying, but I think my running dreams are the ones that are simultaneously the best and worst of my dreams. The running dreams feel real. As though somewhere in my DNA is the program code for running and my brain can take it and play it through my mind and across my body so that during the dreams I feel totally whole. I am wind. My muscles and veins have life. And then I wake up. I can never get back to the same feeling if I try to go back to sleep right away. On those nights I don’t usually go back to sleep at all. It is too depressing. So, I read.

If there’s an invention that I think has made life hugely better for disabled people in last hundred years, it’s the ebook. I don’t have to ask anyone to read or try to finagle a heavy book into a spot where I can both see it and turn the pages. Harder than you think when you’re farsighted and can’t lean forward or turn over. If I’m lucky, my older sister will help me to bed and she’ll let me keep my earbuds and ipad close. My parents think it is a distraction from rest. I guess I get to be a normal teen at least in a few ways.

After my running dreams, I like to read either science fiction or westerns. Frankly, I think they are mostly the same. I mean there’s always bad guys and mission to do or a wrong to right and shooting things with either lasers or bullets. My favorite western is this stupid historical one that is kind of a romance novel I think. I found it for free in the stuff posted by authors on the ebook sight. I don’t care so much about the love story and I really don’t care about this chick’s petticoats and their various levels of tightening. But the writer knows how to write about horses so well that I don’t care about the rest. The author, it says it's by Terrance Walter but seriously that is not a name, must be from horse farm or something. He has this amazing scene where horses from the chick’s family farm get loose and end up running through the streets of Chicago, but like western Chicago, so all old timey.

“Each horse in its turn, no more than half a footstep from the next, rumbled and thundered down the clapboard road at a speed that said anyone caught in their path risked the pain of death. Their brown coats heaved and swelled as their breathes reached peak to bring their trampling hooves down upon the earth like rail splitting hammers. Their legs pulsing as their hearts strained to keep the pace of freedom.”

Gets me every time. Reading it is almost like being in the dream. Almost like running. My breaths always get a bit fast and I have to close my eyes to calm down before I set off any alarms on my monitoring machines  in the night. That Terrance, he knows what it is to miss running.

Wonderfully Bonkers British Radio

WARNING contains: me, cheese, Carpenters, translations, generalizations, assumptions, exaggerations and plugs for radio I like. 

A brief bit of background on my music taste- I am not a genre music listener. My collection ranges from D'Angelo to Alison Krauss to Coldplay to Vivaldi to Allman Brothers to Jill Scott to ZZ Top to Dizzy Gillespie and more. Most of what I listen to is, or was, kinda mainstream I realize. I listen to a good deal of obscure Hipster music too but usually not until they've decided they hate it, aka Mumford and Sons. 

In trying to describe British radio stations to American friends I came to this phrase most often "bonkers." But it is wonderfully bonkers. Here is a recent string of tunes as heard on a popular London radio station:

• Coldplay - Fix You
• Barbara Streisand - A Woman in Love
• Peter Gabriel - Salisbury Hill (note this is one of my all time favorite songs)
• Phil Collins - Against All Odds (awesome TAL piece featuring this song FYI)
• The Average White Band - yes, the Average White Band
• T'Pau - China in your Hand (yes, they had more than one song)
• Pharrel - Happy
• Queen - I've Got to Break Free
• Passenger - Let her Go (no, I don't know who they are either)
• and then Arcade Fire, Goo Goo Dolls, Outkast, Bob Marley and Goyte.

After which I just had to pull over and cry with joy at the ridiculousness of that string of madness. I love the lack of genre specific pushiness towards a single musical outlook or demographic group. I love how it often completely lacks what many would think are present day commercially appealing songs. If you want that, you can get it in the UK, don't get me wrong. BBC has more narrowly chosen tunes on various themed channels. There are dance music and more "urban" stations too. But the sort of everyman stations are all like the above. 

Now, there is also a regular overdose of cheese. I mean as far as I can tell the Brits love a cheesy ballad more than the Queen, more than beer, and more than making fun of the Welsh. It seemingly doesn't to matter what the lyrics are per se; it need not be an actual love song. The song just has to have a melodic singer and some seventies like grooviness. By way of example, let me present to you the song Calling Occupant of Interplanetary Craft by the The Carpenters. It sounds like Karen Carpenter is on ludes. Maybe she was I suppose. And the lyrics. Well: 

In your mind you have capacities you know

To telepath messages through the vast unknown

Please close your eyes and concentrate

With every thought you think

Upon the recitation we're about to sing

Calling occupants of interplanetary craft

Calling occupants of interplanetary craft

Calling occupants of interplanetary most extraordinary craft

(if you're struggling for distraction, read the fab wikipedia entry on this crazy tune)

I heard this song twice on the radio. Yesterday. So yeah, let's all groove on some cheese ball tunes into our next cuppa. Often these songs are dedication, which is how I know that it is really the people of England who are seriously devoted to easy listening. 

Another thing I love is that a number of these stations do a "guess the year" session every day. They play five or ten or twenty songs all from one year and people guess. It might be 2000 or 1988 or 1963, doesn't matter. I really enjoy it. 

Now there's room to go into issues of mainstream culture in Britain and talk about radio listenership decline and blah, blah.* But let me enjoy my silly radio pleasures for a little while longer ok, mate? 

I think a lot of radio stations in the US might get more listeners if they were more interested in variety and enjoyment instead of demographics and genre line blurring. (here let me plug Chris Demm's weekly themed rock-ish show on Rock 92.3 out of Greensboro, NC for being cool and good fun**)

*I have further thoughts on the long term success and addiction some Brits have to the radio soap opera called The Archers. You can podcast it in the US I think. And you should. It is easy to find as it is ALWAYS in the top ten podcast downloads on the BBC website. Yes, top ten. Always. 

** I still listen to ROCK 92.3 over the internet while in the UK and I credit Kelly, Demm, and Deirdre with helping me feel less homesick....even with the Bojangles ads. Thank you:)

Failure is an option

Last week's writing prompt:

"I think failure is inevitable and necessary. We should give ourselves permission to fail or we'd never write anything. You have to forgive yourself for failing. In the absolute sense, pretty much every piece of writing fails because theoretically it could always be better." Lionel Shriver

I began thinking about this in terms of times in my life when I have chosen to fail versus times I have failed at something, period. When I was 20 and living in LA, I realized that I did not want to do the things I needed to do, become the person I needed to be, in order to have success in the film industry. I chose to fail and it took a year to realize that choosing to fail and being a failure were not the same thing. 

More recently, I have failed to be fully myself. I've shrunken down and pulled inward so as to be what other's imagine as less offensive. I've also failed to fix the heartaches of people I love. I've failed to sleep enough and therefore failed to be as generous and kind as I strive to be each day. As I've been trying to punch up a chapter of a novel I wrote in order to submit it for a grad school application, I've wondered if that novel is a failure as well. Or is it enough to know I wrote it and that a few people read and it liked it well enough. 

Then I went to hear Neil Gaiman read some of his writing aloud and also perform one story with a quartet and illustrations (really great, btw, if he tours your way, GO!). Introducing one of his short stories, he mentioned that he wrote it for This American Life but they rejected it. And I thought, "What?!" You don't get much more famous as a writer, as literary rock star, than Neil Gaiman and someone said, "Nah, not what we're looking for, thanks." At no point did he say he felt he had failed, despite a commissioned story being rejected. He said he liked the story and then he read it to an audience which seemed to largely like it too. Gaiman said he was putting together a collection of short stories and it was fun to go back and read over, to collect and rediscover stories he'd forgotten about. Not failed things; forgotten, stuff in a notebook, in the back of a desk drawer things.

My lesson learned here is this, and damned if it shouldn't have been blatantly obvious given what's gone on just with this blog over the past month, but writing as a release of creativity from one's mind, when written to sooth the soul, written to express something real or imagined, really ought never have a label of pass or fail attached to it. Do you have a guilty pleasure book? One you love but it is a genre or author or story that you're embarrassed to admit you read and more still that you love it? Odds are high someone, somewhere has deemed that writing a failure. It fails to be smart enough or demure enough or simple enough or genre specific enough. But you love it. And you should. The person who wrote it hopefully loves it to. They birthed it. Writers should write because they have a story tell and they should love their work regardless of other people's judgement. 

Notice I didn't say regardless of critique. I'm not saying all writing is good because someone, somewhere loves it. I'm just saying that there's a range out there and if one writer's odd ball tale makes a few people feel more normal or feel more joy, that's important. A writer's work needs feedback and editing. I just don't think it all needs perfecting. We can't all write like that and there's room for the most beautifully chosen and arranged words along side the simpler writing that may seem base but can still tell a good story. Writing can't fail if it's loved and nurtured. It can't fail if it speaks deeply to even just a handful of people. Failure in writing can only come, I think, in not sharing it.