One Month of Blogging
Today marks my first full month of blogging. It’s been a lot of fun, I am glad to announce, in spite of the bugs I had to work out in getting the design and the function to cooperate. A friend asked me what Waltzing in Perdition was all about and I realized I already articulated my reason in the Forward for A Beautiful Hell. So, to celebrate thirty straight days of a lot of fun, here it is. And, by the way, I’m actually on the verge of laughing in that photo up there. Just in case you were wondering.
I sit in the barber chair while Mom-to-be goes on and on about the hopes, dreams, and plans into which Life is about to drag invite her. I can’t stop smiling at her and, thank God, join her in her happiness. It would be easy to lend only a polite grin and work to restrain a laughter-laced cynicism knowing she has no idea what Life is really up to.
But that would not only be cruel, it would show how little I’ve actually learned.
“My baby is due in one week!” she says nearly laughing, and in a stream of associations, goes on about the nursery, the baby clothes, the names she and her husband are fighting over, and whether she’ll get to “go natural.”
It is beautiful.
I make a point not to eclipse her thrill with anything in my own experience which might selfishly rob her of the great joy about to overwhelm her entire world.
“My eldest is turning thirteen in one week!” I say nearly groaning, and in a stream of associations inside my own head and heart, go on about the day he was born, the many years since, the ups and downs, the triumphs and tragedies and every inward and outward eventuality I’ve experienced since Life broke over the horizon of my smallness. I don’t realize I’m not listening to her until she brakes my reverie with, “…I think it’s hard for everyone.”
“What did you just say?”
“I said the teen years…they’re hard for everyone. The parents, certainly the kid…everyone.”
“Yeah, we’re all flying blind,” I offer.
And on she goes, again, full tilt into more delight about her coming child. And it truly is beautiful.
But I’m far away inside my head again, because unbeknownst to her, she’s afforded me something I’ve been looking for for several months: a title to the second book in The Waltzing in Perdition series. Which I realize is, to say the least, premature to mention here since you’re barely into A Beautiful Hell.
But that’s the fluid nature of Life: things flow in and out and over and under. And definitely through. And definitely never in the nicely-packaged, linear fashion I prefer. Sometimes what happened a long time ago doesn’t fully come into focus for years. And other times what we thought was crystal clarity undergoes a convulsive shift as Life Right Now crashes onto our shore, forever changing what we thought we knew.
All this sounds very serious, I know: children, marriage, learning to unlearn, discovering just how deeply and how surgically Life intends to cut. And though I think it is quite serious, I mean to convey it wrapped in the the only medium I’ve found flexible enough to hold it all together. That is, laughter.
So, for now, here is a small collection of short stories, and a glimpse seventeen years and three children deep into what I’ve come to call the Beautiful Hell. Or the Waltz in Perdition. Or whatever you call that arena in which you daily find yourself torn between laughing your head off or tearing off theirs.
You’ll forgive, I hope, that these stories were never originally written to one day be published in book form. As such, I fear a lack of cohesiveness in their order. They were written for no other reason than they made me laugh and I needed something to post on my blog. And as blogs afford the convenient idiosyncrasy of a grossly informal literary style, you’ll also forgive devices like “lol,” recruiting elements like strikethrough, and, worst of all I’m told, an inordinate amount of rendering words in capital to force something akin to a proper noun.
Also, the occasional run-on sentence. Or fragment. All to convey, as best I could, the way I actually talk in real life. I thought long and hard on whether to leave them as I wrote them. Grammar and style warred in me a long time. Style won, so I decided to go ahead and throw caution to the wind. In the end, it mattered to me more that the reader somehow hear the tone and tenor of my voice more than credit me with the finer rules governing the written word.
Enough whining explanation. We’ve got a lot of Going Off to cover, so sit down, grab your coffee, and enjoy. And always remember: Todd loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. (Actually, I don’t, so back off.)
lol.
I need to be tapped therapied quickly.
Please have this blog delivered into my email every morning… thank you to the powers that be.
onward lil one, onward
B
Let’s see. Try this: feed://www.waltzinginperdition.com/feed That should call up the rss fee and you should see several options somewhere on the page…one of them should be Subscribe in Mail or something like that. Let me know if that does it :)