Month: April 2023

The madness on pages 210-211

So one morning, before I began writing on page 210, I proved to myself that my 240-page journal actually is 240 pages long, by numbering pages 211 to 240 once and for all. And I found myself with only 30 pages to fill before I complete a 20th journal. (Note to self: Almost time to buy a new journal.) 

I started a number of journals over the years; I started the first journal I ever finished in October 2011, and it took me until June 2015 to get to the last page. Truth be told, writing every day in the journal did not become a habit until mid-April 2015, when my words started sprawling across the pages almost unbidden and I found it was something I needed to do.

Here we are now, after almost eight years of journal-journal-journaling through 20 previously blank books of scribbles and ideas and rants and all. 

(And for some reason, the next thing I wrote was the following.)

I’m feeling a little crazy this morning, my pen wandering free over the pages — wait, did I just use something free to illustrate something crazy? Is freedom is a crazy concept? Are we nuts when we want to be free? No! No! I refuse to believe it!

Is there a meaning and a purpose to all of this, and what if there’s not? What if we’re all just making it up as we go along, and life is merely one long meandering stream of consciousness? You’d like that, wouldn’t you? It gets us off the hook for all the madness we’re responsible for. What a laugh. What a joke. What a jolt.

“He doesn’t mean it, folks; he’s just doing a mental exercise letting his brain fly wherever it wants.”

Who was that, expressing himself between quotation marks? That, my friends, is the self-editor/self-censor who reaches into my free-journaling brain and says, “OMG, what will people think if they see me writing something like that?” instead of just letting loose. Good grief, do I hate that. Off I go on a flight of fancy or some ridiculous notion and this bonehead brain of mine breaks in and says, “Uh oh, tut tut tut, mustn’t fly too high or explore dark thoughts, love, oh no, stay safe, don’t cross any lines that someone may misunderstand, none of that now, dear, no no no — YES. Just YES. Enough of the no.

(When the self-censor strikes, sometimes we need to resist. Sometimes our darkest thoughts lead us into the light. In this case, the light was this: We are conditioned to believe that freedom is a crazy concept, but we are born free; we need to be free in order to be healthy.)

The gap between here and there

I did stop and look at the artwork like I promised myself the other day, and it was a treat. It seems the hospital staff created all or much of the painting and photography on display in the long corridor between the hospital itself and the Cancer Center.

This photo, taken by the hospital’s RN coordinator, caught my eye because the Mackinac Bridge is one of my favorite places in the world. Completed near the beginning of my lifetime, the 5-mile-long Mighty Mac links Upper Michigan and Lower Michigan and is an engineering marvel decades in the making.

My father’s father was part of the team that designed and built the Panama Canal, and so I have always been fascinated by structures that close the gap between here and there. It’s said the ferries across the Straits of Mackinac were so busy that the waiting line of vehicles could stretch to 16 miles or more. That agonizingly long wait became a 10-minute drive in 1957, and all of a sudden St. Ignace and Mackinaw City were not so far apart after all.

When I drive from our home near the shores of Green Bay to visit friends and family in New Jersey, I usually drive two hours longer than I have to, because I choose to go over the Mackinac Bridge, rather than drive the more direct route through Milwaukee and Chicago. Yes, I hate driving through those congested metropolitan areas, but it’s more because I love the 10-minute journey driving higher and higher until 1,000-foot-long cargo freighters look like toys floating on the water below Mighty Mac. It’s the closest you can get to flying while still attached to the ground with four tires.

It’s a thing of beauty and power and hope — hope because it shows what inspired humans can do when they set their minds to it — and while trudging along a corridor to visit a loved one who is staying in the Center for Advanced Care, hope is a wonderful thing to have.

Whoever came up with the idea to line that corridor with art has my undying gratitude.

A Jeep Thompson victory

The legend of Jeep Thompson would be ready for launch today, if I were to take a leap of faith …

I put Jeep back up on the banner Thursday morning. For the first time in longer than I care to admit, I read my unfinished novel Jeep Thompson and the Lost Prince of Venus, and darned if it isn’t better than I remember.

We creative types are our own worst enemies, because of that inner critic who insists that whatever we write is not as good as it could be. That evil impulse, to tear down our every effort, is downright diabolical and the cause of every unfinished novel in the world.

The other day I got to thinking, my most successful work of fiction was not a novel but a series of novelettes. What if I were to break my imagined 40,000-45,000 word novel into three novelettes of about 15,000 words each? That was what brought Jeep back up on my screen Thursday.

I decided I would practice the (hopefully) inevitable audiobook and started reading the manuscript out loud. That was as good an exercise as the coaches said it would be — I found some clunky phrases and words to clean up, and it helped me feel the emotion I was trying to convey.

But the exercise yielded two important revelations. First, what I said up there in the first paragraph: I like how the story is going. Second, and this is what made me put Jeep back up on the banner: If this is a trilogy of novelettes, the first installment is finished. It’s done. Act One is ready for prime time: The legend of Jeep Thompson would be ready for launch today, if I were to take a leap of faith that I could finish and launch Acts Two and Three before your interest fades.

I toyed with that idea, I really did: I saw myself posting the 15 chapters of the first novelette, a day at a time, for the next two weeks, in hopes Chapters 16 through 30 would be ready starting on the 16th day. That’s the insidious thing about the joy of finishing: Conceiving a set of three smaller works instead of One Longer Beast set me up to have an early victory — the first novelette is done! — but in my excitement I almost set myself up for probable defeat when I didn’t get the next 15 chapters finished in 15 days.

And so Jeep is back on the banner, I’ve passed the first hurdle, I’m well into the second novelette, I’m focused on finishing, but I’m not making any specific promises yet. Like George Lucas and his Star Wars trilogies, I have plans for nine Jeep Thompson novelettes, three trilogies, each trilogy a novel. Actually, my plan for the Jeep Thompson universe also includes — no, wait, I’m on the cusp of saying too much, and don’t you hate when people start to reveal something and say, “No, wait, I’d better not tell you that”?

In any case, if it turns out that the history of Jeep Thompson’s creation is worth telling, let the record show that April 20, 2023, was an important date, the day that Jeep’s chronicler realized that Act One of this nine-act adventure was indeed finished. I can’t wait until you read it — well, that’s disingenuous, because I CAN wait. I just wish Acts Two and Three were as ready as Act One is.