Shedding some light...on the vast ocean of my interests

While I sat here, debating whether I should dive into more homework - it's never ending! - or write a blog for this week, since I missed last week (sad face), I decided to spend this half hour before I have to go cook chicken for tonight's dinner recipe...to write a blog post!

And on top of debating whether I should write a blog post now - when I have my shared room in my apt. on campus to myself - or write it after dinner, I was thinking about what I wanted to write about. And then my eye traveled to the latest additions tacked onto the cork board behind my laptop on my desk. Which includes four postcards I got at Sandpiper Restaurant in Door County, WI. Last week Saturday my parents decided to drive up there and check out the fall colors. I brought one of my roommates along and we enjoyed a day of getting off campus. And albeit we didn't find many spectacular fall colors, or even any wooded trails to walk on so I could do what I do best...snap myriad pictures, it was still great to see my parents for a day and like I said before...get off campus. I'm sure you college students who also live on campus can understand. I mean, during the school year it seems like my world shrinks to campus and the grocery store. Exciting right?

Anyway, about my obsession with postcards. Most of the places they boast about in artfully crafted and colorful pictures, I've never actually been too, yet I have them tacked to my desk here at the apt. and also taped to my bedroom walls back home. A lot of them - like the latest four I mentioned earlier - are pictures of lighthouses, most of them in the U.P but some of them in Wisconsin, like the four from Door County. So what's it with you and lighthouses, you may be thinking? Are lighthouses just another offshoot of your obsession with old houses?

Now there may be some truth to that question, because seeing as how most of the postcards I have of lighthouses are those that are historical. But in my defense, who wants a postcard of a new lighthouse? They're ugly. At least with - most anyway - historical lighthouses the houses attached to them actually look like homes. And I guess another reason I found such an interest in them is because just like old houses in general, lighthouses comes in many different shapes and sizes.

Also, my love of lighthouses - which, if I remember correctly, started in late high school, or maybe even after? - may stem from my somewhat baffling dream of living in a ramshackle, weather-beaten and grayed historical cottage on the lip of some crumbling rock facade overlooking a tempest tossed ocean of foaming curses and savagely tossed skirts. In other words, I'd like to find a ramshackle cottage in Maine,  or somewhere in New England where they get those savage "Nor'easter;s". I probably made all of native New England cringe by writing that phrase, did I spell it wrong?

In turn, my love of New England comes from the many historical homes that are amassed there, and also I've always thought New England has some of the best fall foliage around, especially Vermont! Every autumn picture I see of Vermont in Country magazine almost streams off of the glossy page in rich colors and textures. Of course, I'm well aware I might be generalizing about Vermont, or simplifying, whichever word fits better, but I'm sure I found myself plopped down in the middle of some trim, 18th-century Vermont small-town after college with blankets of crisp-smelling leaves falling around me...I wouldn't be complaining!

So why then, you might be asking, do you wish to see such violent weather overcome the sea? And by the way, when I do view one of the legendary "Nor'easter's"I would like to do so in a lighthouse. Of course a historical one! I think it is for the simple fact that I want to hear how the water sounds slashing and gnawing at the rock facade, and how the wind feels galloping around the lighthouse walls, and how the floor shakes with the force of water and wind, two seemingly innocuous elements of the earth converging to split sky and ground, brick and mortar, flesh and bone, calm and night.

Which leads me to yet another offshoot on this ever-expanding tree of my passions...severe weather. Now after reading that bit about me wanting to witness a black-soul storm churning low over some far-flung waters you might be thinking...there's no surprise! Not only do I wish to witness an ocean chomping at the bit, but I also more than any other force of nature, wish to see a tornado in person. But not just a tornado, mind you, I want to also see an innocent thunderstorm move slow over the Oklahoma plains and build ominously and deliberately into a famed supercell. I want to feel the apprehension build in the air while it lays lifeless like a thin draping of skin against a starving stray dog. I want to hear the crowding silence that comes to pack close to your skin just before a tornado churns from the sky. Branching from my love for photography, I'd like to travel along with a storm chasing team and photograph severe weather...specifically tornadoes and lightning. Capturing lightning on film - satisfactorily of course! - has been a dream of mine since I can remember! As has seeing a tornado in person.

Of course, I'm well aware that when that day comes - and I'm certain it will! - I'll be terrified. After all, tornadoes aren't to be taken lightly. Just as when lightning slithers down from those wispy-edged black and gray clouds, splitting a burning path to the ground, I'll feel my skin crawl and something deep inside me clamor against my skull, itching to run away, to turn towards common sense instead of edging further out towards the cockeyed lip of reason trembling with a soft cackle and a focused stare that in fact stares nowhere. After all, as further proof that these dreams of mine haven't stemmed from various books and novels I've read over the years - albeit, that's probably the inadvertent case in some of them! - I can mention the first ever novella I wrote in middle school entitled "Eye of the Storm".

It involved a main character, Cassandra, her sister Holley, and their father, whose name I can't remember, and a violent thunderstorm - and ensuing tornado -  that tears their world apart. And aside from the fact that I based the story in Wyoming near the mountains - I know, I know, I can hear you laughing! - and that even after four or five notebooks filled I never actually got to the whole storm thing, that unfinished novella proves that even in middle school I was writing about rural life and tornadoes. So why stray from it now?

But Corrina, you might be asking, why translate such passions to your real life? Why not leave your characters to race towards that tornado? Or move into that dilapidated Victorian a stone's throw from the town limit to nowhere? Because, just as I've always known I should write about rural life, tornadoes, old houses, troubled pasts and the occasional murder/supernatural mystery...I know that with each character I create they reflect a larger part of me that I can't bring to the surface...well, at least I haven't been able to yet. Some day when I'm photographing that black-throated tornado, or wrapping myself in blankets while I watch the stealthy winter wind slip between the cracks in that old two-over-two window in my ramshackle historic house, I might catch a glimpse of one my characters, ambling along, and think...finally, I have the life they have, the life I dream about, the life that at one point I could find only through words, words like this, and through stories that started a decade ago, dreams that found life through my imagination, but had really started in my heart.

PB&...P?

No, I'm not talking about the sandwich, of which thankfully I have never bitten into. The thought of peanut butter mingling with jelly between two layers of thick - or thin - bread, is disgusting to me. As is peanut butter itself as of late. Give me a ham, cheese and salami sandwich please!

When you start rhyming words within sentences, you know it's time to start a different topic. But first, let me apologize for not posting a new blog post in what, two weeks has it been? It's simply a matter of schoolwork getting in the way, not having an opportune moment...or a lack of inspiration. One of them still plagues me now, the latter, but yet here I sit, intent on writing a blog post for Wednesday, Sept. 28th. Speaking of the date, it seems crazy that September is almost over, let the "burr months" begin! *Insert unenthusiastic wave here*.

So, back to the title of today's blog post. You're probably thinking, the last time I checked PB&P wasn't any sandwich I've heard of, and maybe you'd be right. But it could be something like peanut butter and pickles, or peanut butter and pretzels. Okay,  now I'm just having too much fun with it. The real meaning behind the title is an abbreviation - not the real name I know, I'll be damned if I remember it though! - of my three favorite photo-editing sites: Picnik.com, Befunky.com and Photobucket.com. Just like everyone else, I go through 'fads' in life, some are temporary - like my obsession with the Christian-pop group Jump5 in middle school - and some, it seems, are intent on lingering longer even as I look on in puzzlement - like my summertime transition to listening to strictly 80's rock music on my iPod, almost exclusively, turning my back on the 80's and 90's country music that was there long before the other genre was, while still even more fads have settled in comfortably amongst the packed recesses of the rooms where I house my myriad passions, and have found amicable conversation with them all, finding a common ground...I'll end the metaphor here, since I realize this has been one rambling sentence since the word "just".

It seems the "fad" I developed thanks to my fellow photosnapper - I couldn't help but pen that phrase, it just popped into my mind like delicately browned toast awaiting a thick blanket of butter on a Sunday morning - and cousin, Kelly, is here to stay, and I don't mind! Photo eiditing seems like a natural extension to my photography passion, and also an excuse for me to exercise my graphic-artist ambitions - damn, I hate settling for a lesser word! There was a word I was going to place there instead of "ambitions" but I can't think of it. But what, you ask, is so 'addicting' about embellishing photos?

This rhetorical question, humorously enough, makes me think back to one of my favorite - and I don't normally like/watch them - sitcom shows, Reba, where Barbara Jean - the classic blonde, in every way - goes nuts with a bejewler and a sewing machine and totally buries a once modest denim jacket in jewels and sparkles. It also brings to mind the bedazzler for jeans, what a crazy idea. Now I feel like one of my favorite characters I've created, Lorraine Lansing, where I single-handedly steer my thoughts off course, or find myself sitting back and silently laughing at the humor of my wayward thoughts. Now I know for sure that in every character I create, there is certainly some part of myself reflected in each of them.

But to answer my own question, I guess I just like seeing the extra potential in each photo. Or what different effects can add to it when I'm on one of the three websites I listed above. Also, like I said before, it gives me a chance to exercise my graphic-design muscle. And obviously I love just plain photos, and sometimes there's nothing I can add to a photo, but sometimes when I snap a picture my mind excitedly leaps forward, way ahead of me, thinking how I can edit that photo, what certain phrase I can add to it, what effect I can apply to it to make it a trifle better than what it is.

Adding text to my edited photos is my new favorite thing. And if any of you, my fellow blog readers and posters!, know me...it just can't be any saying, or word. It has to be strategically thought through, until not just the letters themselves settle perfectly into the picture...but phrase - or simply a sentence - does as well.

I really do have a lot to owe to my cousin. This past summer I took dozens upon dozens of pictures, and I was inspired to get back into photography because of the photographs she was regularly posting. And albeit she doesn't share my passion for old/abandoned houses and such, she does love the countryside, small town life, and walking amongst the woods and silence. In my life I have met very few who share so many of my passions, and unfortunately most of the people I have met that do...live far away, like my cousin the U.P. Perhaps then, that's another reason I write, so I can connect with people - albeit only in my mind - who share my passions, and whom I can 'converse' with about the things I love, and my reasons for loving them.

To end this week's blog post, I'll share a photo I have edited on one of the three sites I mentioned. It's an old house I found while trolling the streets of one of my favorite small towns, Calumet, Michigan. It's an old copper mining town that literally has dozens of either abandoned or derelict historic houses, and let me tell you when I discovered these troves of such houses, I was estatic! Well...only on the inside of course. If I were to start shouting and jumping in my seat, and my roommates came running...only to discover that I was all excited over street after street of shoddy-faced houses in a U.P town I've only been to once - sad fact, let me tell you! - they would probably cock an eyebrow, an awkward silence would follow, and I'd be left fumbling to explain why I'm so excited. But what would be even more awkward, would be if they caught me holding my camera up to the computer screen, positioning it just so, so I can capture one of those said houses in Calumet, and then edit it on either P, B or P and then post it to my Facebook albums.

Yes, you read that right, I take pictures of old houses on Google Maps because I don't know if I'll ever get to see them in person. God knows I wish I could! Maybe someday I'll be that traveling photographer and then I'll have the perfect excuse! How scrumptous that would be! Such is the case with the photo I'm posting along with this week's blog post. Who knew Google Maps could be so delightful?

(Okay, so I failed to upload an edited Calumet house picture, so the next best thing is a favorite spot of my cousin's in the U.P called "Powerlines", and from the photo it's so secret why it's called that. And after visiting the spot - photo was taken from a rock named "Baldy", I can understand why she loves it so much! Amazing views! Plus, so many telephone poles! This photo's patina was created layering several different effects. It always makes me think of perfectly aged wine. And the song "Dust on the Bottle".)

Oh, by the way, the U.P is my favorite Google Maps exploring spot, especially Calumet and Ishpeming. :) For some reason, exploring Wisconsin just seems boring.

A flickr of an obsession

You know what I saw when I logged into my Blogger account? That this week's post - the one you're reading right now - is my 100th blog post! Now honestly I'm not really that excited, but inwardly I'm just mulling that number over while my fingers - stiff from the slightly-cool early September wind - become more limber and accepting of the keyboard.

But just as a year doesn't feel like a year anymore, and a hundred dollars in your pocket means you're set for a month - maybe more than that if you're pinching the pennies, I guess writing my 100th blog post doesn't seem like that much of a landmark. Now on the other hand if I were writing my 100th novel, then I think that would be something worth getting excited over, but not with my blog. Not that I don't value it of course, but I know that I view my novellas and my blog posts differently.

It feels like I'm rambling, so why don't I get to the point. If any of you are familiar with the site, maybe you'll pick up on my intentional spelling error in the title. You see, there's a site called flickr.com where users can share their photos and comment on and favorite them. Most of the photographs I've seen were taken by professionals - you can distinguish on your account if you're a professional photographer - but yet a lot of them are just amature photographers like me, who wish to share their photos with the world.

So what exactly am I obsessed with when it comes to Flickr you ask? Well, just like in music and food, there are certain types you tend to stick with, and I'm not one of those people who feels inclined to stray out of my "favorites-rut" and discover something new. Which is a long way of saying that just like with Google Maps I look at...old/abandoned house pictures! Yes folks, I'm just a barrel of eclectic tastes! I'm all over the map! No pun intended!

But then again, it doesn't really bother me that I don't have varied tastes in things - to use the word "things" as a flimsy substitute for my interests - because when it comes to the things I'm interested in, I know I have a deep-seated passion for them, and don't consider it a waste of time if I sit at my computer for an hour when I'm supposed to be getting to bed and flipping through picture after picture of abandoned houses and farms. And this is where my "mega-curiosity streak" comes in.

My mega-curiosity streak is what sometimes leads me to finding that tantalizing abandoned house hiding alongside the crumbling, silent lip of a narrow country road, it's what causes me to cruise down the streets of some small town in Google Maps - mostly in the U.P, eh! - searching for a dilapidated house, or just wondering what's down this road? Where does this corner open up to? It's also the same curiosity that has lead me to some of my favorite artists, or where I've found myself watching the music video for the latest pop song because I was wondering what it was like. Which, let me tell you, I'll be doing less often! Some of those videos are quite interesting...to use that word loosely because I don't want to waste time talking about the latest pop sensation. My mouth is filling with a bitter taste already.

And also I want to steer away from those subjects because I have a tendency to get cynical and sarcastic. But apparently I didn't get away from the subject fast enough because somewhere deep in the traitor part of my brain Katy Perry's "E.T" is playing. Speaking of weird, right? I mean, any song that has Kanye West in it - shudder - has got to be unnerving. The guy's a creep.

You know what I think would be fun? Some day, when I decide to let the part of me sitting down at my computer right now to just dissolve away and let Side B of me settle into the comfy dorm computer chair and just start plucking random keys like a bored cat pressing piano keys, a discontorted song rising up from its fluffy paws, I would love to just unload all the sarcasm, frustration, confusion and sometimes slight anger and disgust I have towards music of the pop, country and modern rock genres. I mean, I'm sure we all have it, for different reasons, but I think I've always practiced restraint, both in my writing and my lift. Well, part of it comes from the fact that I honestly don't know how to translate the sarcasm that flows so easily in my novellas...into my actual everyday life. Because essentially that sarcasm is more so on my Side B, rather than my Side A. And as I'm understanding both now - and probably a while ago too - Side B of me is almost translated entirely in my novellas, and funneled through the characters I create. Which brings me to a favorite quote of mine spoken by Ann Tyler - I'm assuming she's a writer of some sort? I'm not sure, can't remember anymore - which is: "I write because I want to have more than one life". And that's why I write! So I can release Side B of me. I can blare it over the crackling speakers of some old, faded-red, convertible Mustang while I wind down country roads, the tires hugging the crumbling shoulders like spindly winter trees wrapping around the weather-beaten sides of an abandoned house, providing both a steady shoulder yet a close reminder of death, a constant, tightening touch.

And even though all of the characters I create inevitably have their problems - most of them in the past, since I seem to focus on each character's past - I still find freedom in their lives, as if just as I give them life, they give me life in return. It's as if they're saying they can live without me giving them words to pages, but their life becomes so much more when I do. Which could lead me back to my blog post about "picking up hitchikers". Each character comes to me as a whole jigsaw puzzle, it's just that only a dozen or so pieces will have pictures on them, and even then they might be faded while the rest of the pieces are blank, staring up at me like an umarred piece of paper, awaiting the pen to summon the words that are hiding within.

Well, I certainly haven't talked about flickr.com much have I? I believe not that long ago - in fact, sometime this summer - I created an account with Flickr, for the sole purpose of favoriting my favorite abandoned house pictures, and as o fright now I think I'm at more than two-hundred. Some users will have literally hundreds and I'll just keep clicking through their photostream, enticed and excited by the small thumbnails of the photos and I can't resist clicking on them to make them bigger. More of the curiosity thing, remember? Also, by way of Flickr I've also discovered some amazingly interesting abandoned towns, most of them in sparse states like Kansas and North Dakota.

The more photos I favorite and enjoy - secretely, slightly jealous of all the photographers who capture such amazing shots of beautifully dilapidated houses - I can't help thinking how much I would love to be a traveling photographer and capture such beauties for myself. Getting paid to roam America's crumbling backroads like the decomposing spine of some once-loyal and well-feared guard dog within the dusty remains of a city dump or regal dairy farm that now only has his legends, his hilariously infalted tales told by wide-eyed children to let others know that he was once much more than what he is now. Some may find such exploits lonely or disturbing if they were to deliberately seek out such crumbling facades and sightless windows wide shut, like visiting an abandoned, overgrown cemetery to chat with the centuries old bones, keeping company the remains of a great-great grandparent you never knew.

But I wouldn't see it that way. There's a certain, ambigous flame that ignites within me whenever I spot an abandoned house. It's something I haven't fully been able to grasp, and perhaps I don't want to. For in the same way it's like that curiosity that drives me to new and far-flung places, I can't quite desribe what draws me towards one lazily curving country road and not another, or why I am inexplicably drawn to the sodden-faced, embarassingly-outdated old houses of Calumet and Ishpeming, Michigan and not the newly restored old houses that stand in regal comparison. But what I do know is that with each of these things I have a flickr of an obsession...which can ignite so much more than just a meager flame, for while my obsessions are pale flames stuttering in the wind, my passions that arise from said flames are fires rolling through layers of parched forests, gasping on the dry wood succumbing to ashes within their zealous grasp.

Short ramblings

Well, sometimes no matter whether you have an idea for a blog post or not, life has other plans. Such is the case tonight. Of course, it could have something to do with the fact that my mom was on her Facebook page and then perusing her email inbox on my laptop, and then my brother wanted to see something on a different site...and now here I sit, with a solid idea for a blog post sitting patiently in my mind, and I know I can't write it. It's like sitting in a dingy motel room close to a major highway in L.A. You can tightly close the window, shut the blinds, scoot your chair all the way up to the crumbling desk or your back up against the headboard while your laptop steadily grows warmer on your legs...but yet, you're still the same atmosphere, and no matter how hard you try to crawl your way into your head with a few deliberate sentences and jabs at the smudged keys, that door isn't opening like a warped wooden door in its equally warped frame on a humidity-choked day.

So all you can do, then, is scribble a note on that door - legibally perferably - and come back later, hoping by the time you do that you'll be in a better atmosphere, an atmosphere that allows you to crawl inside your head more easily, like you suddenly shrink to a small child crawling into a bouncy house rather than an overzealous teeanger with more rolls of fat hanging off of their frame than all the jelly rolls in every New York bakery combined, and you can bounce around to your heart's content!

Well, before the metaphors become even stranger than the one just mentioned, let me end tonight's blog post. But first! I must write down two blog post titles for further reference before I forget. Of course, they won't make sense to you, and they might still not make sense to you when I write the blog posts attached to them, but then again, does anything ever make sense that comes from my head? Even when it's on paper?

Anyway, blog post title time! "Building houses without walls" and "A flickr of an obsession". :)

Another look...in the pond of self-reflection

Why I am good at reflecting on my writing habits, and habits of myself, but yet when it comes to actually changing some of said writing habits - even editing my novellas, I find I can't do it? There's endless irony in life, isn't there? Such is what you get I guess when you're talking a little stroll down the pockmarked, crumbling asphalt of memory lane - or your mind just sort of wandered there on its own like mine tends to do when my hands are busy jacketing books and it realizes its not needed - and you happen across the pond of self-reflection, and next thing you know you're staring at yourself, in fragments, in haphazard fragments, and you feel like you're reading your own biography, written by an unfamiliar voice in your head, and you're reading it in that pond, word for word as it is typed behind your eyelids. Only just like when you catch yourself in a funny mirror, the overall person reflected back is familiar, but its the pieces that make up that overall reflection that are foreign. It's like a painting that started out as what is before your steadied easel set just right before the motionless lake shrouded in thin, morning's breath, but once you reach the center, that persistent, nagging white obliterated beneath hardening folds and broad sweeps of paint...it is something else entirely, and yet, it is the same a what nature has laid out before you, like a solid picture taken from time itself, translated from blank rolls of film, woven into shape from wordless pages of an endless book.

Ah yes, it feels good to ramble in my blog once again. It sort of feels like inching along in the sizzling, sun-glaring heat of an L.A highway and then in a moment of desperation when your patience has abruptly snapped against your heatwave-numbed mind like that old, chugging Ford wagon behind you spitting out backfires like the young teen cursing to your left, you decide...you need to go home for a good, long weekend and suddenly you find yourself in that yawning, unfurling space of swaying, whispering wheat fields and leaning telephone poles humming the same old tune, but with a tired grin on their faces, knowing that their fellow brethren they're connected to are carrying the same song hundreds of miles, both above in the frolicking air dipping into the drunkenly dancing fields and beneath them into the loamy, richly dark soil that has been the solid blood of many a farm for centuries.

And more rambling! But while I'm on the subject of L.A - well, kinda - let me just say that after watching the 1994 - I think it was made in '94? - Speed on VHS after I'd picked it up at a garage sale with my brother, that for some absurd reason I find myself wanting to visit L.A. Why? You might be laughing right now, and I'll be honest with you, as I sit here in a position that would make my chiropractor cringe on my non-computer chair at my laptop typing this, a part of me is laughing too. I mean, after all, I'm the person who has declared for how many years on this same blog that when I graduate college I want to live either A) In the countryside and have my neighbor's separated from me by undulating, whispering cornfields or silently stoic windbreaks of trees or B) In a small town that's miles - even hours - away from the nearest large metropolis and preferably have a population under a hundred people, and yet...I want to visit...L.A? Maybe it's because huge cities fascinate me and I just want to ride on one of those huge, sprawling highways that's like a football field for cars, or walk down a sidewalk right in the middle of downtown and feel the towering, arrogant air of all those gleaming, chrome-winking skyscrapers towering above me, crowding the sky until it seems as if they were there first and the sky is simply bleeding and etching itself around them, as if the city itself is a sort of metal forest, as if instead of soil and earth beneath their sturdy foundations it was instead nuts and bolts, steel beams and wire mesh.

Perhaps I want to visit L.A for the same reason that after watching a whole summer of Nash Bridges reruns I want to visit San Francisco. And there's irony too there, folks! Because you see, I have this odd fear of not liking to go up - or down! - steep hills in vehicles. Why? Because I'm terrified of how cars tilt when going up, or down, them. And forget about parking on one! That would be unspeakable. Have I discussed my peculiar fears already? Perhaps I'll save that for another blog post. More self-reflection? I can see I haven't left the pond of self-reflection yet. Although it surely dark by now. Perhaps the one-eyed moon has positioned itself directly behind me, with an almost inaudible snicker...of what? Self-amusement, of amusement with me? With the moon, it's always hard to tell. It falls through billowing curtains, dancing their patterns atop surfaces of a shadow-striped bedroom, it falls upon the cold, ivory keys of a keyboard, playing a silent song with its rapid fingers, like the swiveling ears of a mother doe watching out for prey as her young prance on fluid legs seemingly coiled with the very breath of spring itself, or the wings of a small sparrow perched on a thin branch, its throat vibrating with a mellifluous song but yet its eyes scan the horizon for a flicker of danger, there is no respite even in his most natural of songs.



Perhaps, while I am still gazing steadfastly into this pond of self-reflection, I can say that...maybe my intentions of starting out each blog post with a solid idea for a subject...is foolishness. After all, in a vague, flimsy sort of way, each subject is like an outline. It's something to follow, something to stick to, something to plod back to when I've aimlessly wandered away from it. In fact, all the same I was going this way and that in the above paragraphs I've felt it weighing down on me, like a friend calling after you, or constantly sending you text messages, telling to come home now, just come home, it's getting dark out, the mosquitoes will eat you alive and your legs burn to outrun the arch of that voice, the way it layers itself upon you like the humidity-choked air just before a thunderstorm releases its vapory breath. You don't feel quite free when that voice carries to you, like a small piece, even a single thread, of the outside world has followed you through those silently observing woods, and there's no weed-infested path or arching tunnel of trees or abandoned building with its splintered eyes of wood and glass that can lead you far enough away, no place that can effectively seal you off like they had before, like they always seemingly had.

So what, then? I ask myself, and perhaps you as well, if you care so to answer, that is. What shall I title each blog? I know I can't just leave it blank, that would rub incessantly against my memory - that mental log I have of all the blog posts I've written in the recent past - like the rough-side of a cat's tongue. Titles, for reasons I haven't fully understood, are of high-importance to me, especially with blogs. But, and here it further misunderstanding, they cannot simply be bluntly put, or simple, they must be like the one for today's post, or something totally ambiguous or metaphorical. And yes, I know, it's probably the writer in me, and heaven knows that part makes up a hundred percent and then some! But nevertheless, it is sometimes vexing because it seems that that unquenchable need to arouse a clever title overpowers the need to actually pair a blog post with it. I've heard people say - mostly professors - that a title isn't everything, but apparently my mind never got the memo. Apparently I haven't got a lot of memos, but I think I've been doing well enough.

So, what then, you might be asking, what this blog originally going to be about? Well, I'll have you know that I didn't go completely off track, I just happened to paint this particular post in different shades of the same color, although, mind you, they don't all particularly match! Anyway, this blog was going to be about a fact I am to the realization of when I noticed that both Stephen King - of whom I've had somewhat of a reading obsession with lately - and Wendy Corsi Staub, both routinely set their stories in the states they were born and currently live in. For King it is Maine, and for Staub it is New York. And since I'm in the habit of skimming both the front and back flaps of most of the books I jacket,  I have come to the conclusion that many other fiction writers are in the habit of basing their stories in the states - and sometimes the very cities or towns - that they currently live in.

So I asked myself, why is that? Is it because it's some place, familiar? Or because they feel a deeply rooted connection? Is it because they simply never thought of writing their stories in a setting anywhere else? I guess I'll never get a direct answer unless I ask the authors themselves, or perhaps hunt down interviews online, which doesn't appeal to me at all, let me tell you.

Speaking of which! While I was thinking about all this yesterday at work, I thought to myself, if Wendy Corsi Staub lives in NYC and therefore bases all her stories there, why haven't I written a novella based in Sheboygan? Immediately my mental voice starts to laugh, slap its thighs and throw its head back, and I realize I've gotten my answer. Sheboygan, to me, is unappealing and drab, that I could never imagine conjuring up any elaborate novella here. Plus, I wouldn't want to put any character of mine through the agony of having to live here, even if it's fictitiously. Do I hate my hometown that much, you ask? And the answer is...partly, yes. Sheboygan has it's appeals, but novella-wise? Ha! Not by a long shot. Give me Oklahoma, where I have never set foot but only in my fragmented and uneducated imagination and yet it is where my mind has gone since middle school to lend a home to my characters. And give me Upper Michigan! Which, as of late, has been my 'novella-setting-obsession', I think within the last few weeks I've written out two or three story thoughts that are set in the U.P. Did I mention before that the U.P feels more like my home than Wisconsin does? In all my years of writing, I've only based one novella in Wisconsin, and that as been the White Victorian story. All others have either been in Oklahoma or Upper Michigan. And even when a character moves from one state to another, they're not from Wisconsin.

I see the one-eyed moon has moved away, even his eyelids - or eyelid - are drooping. Plus my hands are starting to ache, time for them to grip the Stephen King book I'm currently reading instead of skipping across this metal, perpetually smudged keyboard. Like I said earlier, it feels good to once again blow out all the "word-wind" in me and see how the individual letters arrange themselves on the page. And it is also good to occasionally gaze into the pond of self-reflection. After all, one never knows what may come up.

Just a quick posting! I didn't forget about my blog! Honestly!

I feel extremely guilty for not posting a blog for two weeks, and I knew I couldn't let it slip into three weeks so I'm just going to do the old standby and post a photo. Today I really did have a posting in mind to talk about, but unfortunately I don't have time to talk about what I wanted to, so below you will find a sunset picture that I took while on a bike ride I went on earlier this evening! I have found a certain road - and roads! - that I love biking down and have always wanted to take my camera along, and finally tonight I followed through! I really can't explain my obsession with photographing telephone/utility poles. It's just one of those things I love, right alongside sunsets and old houses. There's just a part of me they reach out and snag, a part of myself I can't quite locate but they seem to have no trouble at all!

Oh my, I'm rambling, and the hour for my bedtime has come and gone. Enjoy the picture! (P.S: every time I stopped to snap a picture the mosquitoes found me, but I consider each picture worth it!)

Picking up hitchhikers

Since summer has finally decided to turn its ignorant cheek and fold its glorious, sun-shimmering self over Wisconsin, one of my friends and I decided to take a drive through the back roads of our little section of the state. With the windows rolled down, the radio turned up - regrettably like a lot of friends, we disagree on styles of music, but we found a way to compromise - and all the haphazard arrays of trash that lives on the floorboards of her car blowing around our feet, we sought out tantalizingly winding country roads that whispered promises of things to come.

This friend I haven't known too long, maybe a little more than a year, maybe a little less, it's hard to remember sometimes. But when we first met I found her intriguing. She had a certain flair that guaranteed her a sticking spot in your mind as if her memory were like a fresh fly strip set out in a cow barn every hour, so the maximum amount of flies would stick to it at any one time. Not a very glamorous simile, I know, but there it is. From that first moment of meeting her I knew I wanted to get to know her better, so I set about calling her, delving into her world while I shared bits of my own, eventually the two were intermingling.

But on this certain day we were to meet, something different would happen. While the wind played a rough but joyous song through our hair, the radio's voice at once choked and carried thinly on that same wind, the car groaning and bouncing around and underneath us atop the ill-kept country roads...there was a single person trudging towards that same road. Perhaps she could hear the laughter, hear the car crunching over the sharp-toothed potholes of the asphalt. Or perhaps she just felt like taking a gamble today, for no reason in particular. It was perhaps the kind of feeling one gets when passively watching TV and abruptly craving caffeine, of any form, and even while you find your legs restless with the thought your mind is weighed down by the knowledge that it's nearly nine o'clock at night, but some part of you, perhaps greater and more persuasive than your brain, is ignorant to this fact, and so you shuffle into your kitchen, wondering who or what is controlling your limbs and before your mind can scramble forward, reaching for those reins that were whisked from its hands so violently...

The car is slowing down, the single person now stands at the crumbling shoulder, bony arm extended like a dilapidated, abandoned lighthouse still attempting to beckon, even though the once roiling sea beyond is as dry as its splintering brick throat. The radio is turned down, the wind ceases its full-throated song and instead retreats quickly from the interior of the vehicle, leaving the myriad piles of trash to dance aimlessly then flutter somewhat embarrassed to the floorboards, perhaps somewhat haltingly. The single person swivels their head, hair of an indiscriminate color, the same goes for the eyes which hide behind uniform black squares, which would come to be significant in the future when it came to her, only in a metaphorical sense.

My friend turns the radio down even further, leaning over me to gaze out of my window at the person still standing on the shoulder of the road. Her arm slowly drops to her side, the thumb relaxing to rest amongst the other fingers. I feel my own gaze searching those black squares, feeling like a person trying to a read a book of braille with no fingers, or fingers with no sight. My friend, still leaning over me, opens her mouth, her face so close to mine I can smell the strong mint flavor of her bubblegum, and I'm assuming she's about to pose the question "do you need a ride?" when those black squares swivel, catching a thick band of dying evening light - which causes me to glance at the sun standing still and brooding behind a windbreak of trees separating two undulating gold fields.

But it isn't just the black squares that move, its also the sandal-clad feet, and the spindly arms. She crosses the front of the vehicle, the only noise the scraping of her cheap flip-flops on the crumbling concrete...and then the driver's side door opens, my friend raises her hands and arms, but the fingers aren't splayed, and her head isn't down. In fact, glimpsing the corner of her mouth before she is tugged lightly from the seat, I catch a smile, faint but there, as if she had been, what? anticipating this? Could it be?

No time for questions, I tell myself, as the black squares reflect me fully and then turn towards the dirt-streaked windshield. The key turns in the ignition, the gearshift taken in one hand, and then the same mantra continues, only the road before us dissolves away like chess pieces on a picnic table on a windy day. Leaning forward I notice its still a narrow country road unfurling like a crimped and faded ribbon, and there are still rolling fields flanking each side of the road, but somehow it feels different. And I know it isn't only due to the fact that someone new has taken the wheel, her gaze riveted to the windshield and the expanding countryside beyond.

As I settle in my seat, this new meandering road trip in the country a mystery to me, I can't help but wonder where it will take me, and why my previous road trip was severed so abruptly. I had thought things were going smoothly, and - dare I speak it? - could even sense a vague but somewhat solid ending to it all, something that I had found myself within reach of before, but only been disappointed in the end. Would this time be different, I thought?

"We're here." I start at the gravely voice coming from the driver's seat. Glancing quickly at the black squares I find my attention brought again to the windshield. Only this time it isn't a fraying, crimped ribbon before us but the red, crumbling dirt of the Oklahoma plains. Undulating fields of the Midwest have been seemingly violently ironed out until they simply stretch all around us in great, baldy patches of summer-parched grass and deep gouges where I assume tornadoes have churned their flinty teeth.

A low groan sounds to my left. She is getting out of the car. Fingering the release on my seat belt I step outside as well, looking down at the oddity of my pale skin against such a foreign color of soil. Footsteps crunch ahead, she is making her way towards a pair of tall, round silos leaning into the dying evening light, one sporting a rusting, hole-ridden metal cap while the other has only a shell of one, crude steel bars forming a skeleton atop its sturdy lip. Perusing her in a odd half-gait of a walk and jog I let my eyes roam the area around me, noticing nothing more significant than insipid Oklahoma plains and the two silos. Where were we, I wondered?

"My name is Chassyl," she yells to me and I feel my neck crack as I glance sharply upwards. She is sitting on the lip of the leaning silo, her feet now free of the flip flops. With a halo of burning evening sun around her I now notice her hair is perhaps a dark red, or is it a dark brunette? Still impossible to tell, but somehow with more questions piling on top of one another like the basket of dirty towels in the basement no one wants to wash, despite the dwindling supply of clean towels in the closet upstairs, she was become more defined to me, certain features manifesting themselves when I wasn't looking, or wasn't thinking about their absence too much.

"Sorry I had to boot your other friend out of the car," the gravel bed is cleared from her throat. "But I just felt like you needed to get to know me a little bit before you went back to her. I felt myself fading, standing there for those three or four days, waiting for you to finally turn down that road. You know, you should really get that 'no vacancy' sign fixed at that ramshackle motel in your head, that place was so crowded I couldn't believe it! And some of those people have been there since your middle school days! I had quite the conversations with them, and I guess now I can see why they don't mind staying so long, it really is a nice place, even if the motel decor and the building itself reminds me of some small-town, eighties trucker stop."

"What did you say your name was?" I rub my neck, which is by now sore from tilting my head up to look at her. She swings her feet against the silo, the halo of sun retreating now, casting her in uniform shadow again.

"Chassyl," she says, adding a laugh. "But you'll need to know more than that. Come up here and look at this. You'll get a better view from up here, believe me," she adds when I spin around, searching for the place of interest her finger points to. I cock an eyebrow, glancing up the length of the silo. She throws her head back and laughs. I step onto the third rung from the bottom.

"You remind me of my best friend Augie, her real name is Augustine, but no one but her father calls her that, because he can never remember she doesn't like to be called anything but Augie. You'll get to know her too, she's great. She's afraid of heights just like you. Funny how she ended up being best friends with me, right?"

"I guess so," I mumble, looking down as I pulled myself up two more rungs. Just then a ripple of deep-throated thunder cascades through me, making my hands ache as the vibrations travel through the metal ladder rungs.

"You love Oklahoma right?" I glance up at her, realizing I'm swaying slightly and pull myself closer to the rungs. "Then you're going to watch to hurry up and watch another beauty of a thunderstorm roll in. You only get the slow-movers like these in the summer, and they're fun to watch that's for sure."

And that was how I ended up on the very top of an abandoned silo, sitting next to someone I knew only as Chassyl but somehow already knowing we would be friends, even if it was only temporarily, but like all the others crowded into that outdated, seventies-embracing motel in my mind, she would find an empty room and sit patiently, knowing she was stored away safely, and not forgotten.

All right, just in case I need to clarify, none of that actually happened. Well okay, some of it did, but only in my head. And what I mean by that is. I was plodding along, working on a novella where the main character is Lorraine Lansing - the girl at the beginning of the blog post - but then suddenly Chassyl appears on the shoulder, pulling Lorraine gently aside and she takes me to two leaning silos in the middle of red-dirt Oklahoma with a summer thunderstorm drunk on humidity is rolling in and she's sitting on - of all things! - a silo. I used the above metaphorical story to portray the humorous way my mind has of focusing on one story, then interrupting itself to start another - or as I put it in the story, picking up a hitchhiker.

Because in all truth, Chassyl is a hitchhiker, it's just that she's a fictional one! I mean, when you think about, I know nothing about her besides her name and the fact that she's female, yet last night I sat down to write four pages of one random moment in her life and found that I was extremely satisfied with that. Also ironically, while I was at work jacketing books today I thought of a snippet of Chassyl's best friend's past, which would be her best friend Augustine - oh, excuse me, Augie - so I got up and snagged the little notebook I keep in my purse to write it down. But still, you can't expect to get the whole picture with only a few jigsaw puzzles right? But wait, there's more! I also have a vague idea of Chassyl's home life, and she also owns a black gelding named Clandy - which is short for Clandestine, yes I know, not only do I give my characters absurd names, horses apparently don't escape the habit either!

And you might be wondering, what's the whole bit about the 'hotel in your head'? Well, the way I see it is this. Since I'm never able to turn any one character away and whatever haphazard storyline they come with shoved into some dilapidated, outdated and beat-up suitcase they happened to find, I started thinking of my mind as a shabby motel for all of them, and the 'no vacancy' sign never turns on no matter how hard I try. Albeit when I really think about...would I ever want it to turn on? After all, then I risk the chance of passing by intriguing characters like Chassyl, or even Lorraine Lansing! Who is, honestly, one of my favorite characters I've ever created. I mean, how often do you meet someone who doesn't like to wear pants right?

In closing, I can only hope I encounter many more interesting characters within the span of my literary lifetime, and even dare to dream of revisiting some of them in possible novella series or just for the pleasure of rereading things I've writte in the past, perhaps smiling inwardly at the memory of the first day I picked up a hitchiker...and knew it could only get better from there.

My heart knows something my brain doesn't know

Ahh yes, even if I can't cobble together a satisfying blog post each Wednesday, there's nothing like an interesting title to satisfy me! This week's blog post is no different. Now I hope that didn't sound self-indulgent, but if I may digress for a while - like I need permission right? ;) - I've always been a big "title-oholic", now you ask, what the heck does that mean? I'll give you a moment to scratch your head, perhaps I'll join you in your confusion as well!

Albeit it is by no means a necessity in the beginning stages, a title for a novella, a short story, a novel, a poem or any other body of creative work, I've always been obsessed with coming up with a title for each novella I write. Why, you ask? I guess because it gives each novella a firmer foundation. And yes, I know, I can write a hundred-plus story on little more than a glimpse of an abandoned house alongside a narrow country highway, or a single detached scene that glistens in my mind like a sparkling web of sunshine atop a wind-rippled lake, only there is a film of gray clouds above, and the water reflects its tones like a solemn tombstone. Oh dear, here come the similes!

But I think a title gives me more of a clearer vision for that particular novella. Enter the current novella I'm working on: the only title I have for it is "the white Victorian story", why that you ask? Well because frankly the main character lives in a white Victorian! And a beautiful one at that, ;). So why doesn't this particular novella have a title? Honestly? I can't even begin to think of one. Usually I'll try to congeal all the things the story is mainly about and try to stretch a thin subject over all of them like crusty pie dough over a bulging raspberry filling. When that fails I just sit back in my chair, body going limp while my brain picks up the slack and trots off, well sometimes running, it depends on the amount of slack in my limbs and the staccato of my fingertips on the edge of my desk.

Now we've all heard of songs that have titles seemingly unrelated to what they're about, and I don't know about you but at the end of said songs I'm left scratching my head, my skin twitching with irritation and confusion. How did they come up with that title? Why did they come up with it? Does it have a hidden meaning? That last one really gets me, you know? But enough of the unanswerable questions, there's more digressing to do!

Actually, I think I'm plumb out of digressing, imagine that? On to the topic of today's post! Which is...whether you're a writer or not I'm sure you've heard the phrase "write what you know". And today, because of what I do for my job four hours, three days a week, my mind is allowed to go wandering off into the happy land of haphazard thoughts and boundless imagination while my limbs operate on auto-pilot and continue jacketing book after book. Well anyway...while my mind was in its happy place, I started thinking about what the phrase "write what you know" really means...at least to me! ;) You see, at first I took it literally, like to actually write what you know meant to writing about what you understand, or what you are familiar with, like your every day surroundings and whatnot.

Then I started thinking, once my mind had gone a little further and I realized there wasn't going to be any getting it back any time soon and my limbs continued whistling a plethora of tunes stuck in my head and jacketing book after book, what if the phrase "write what you know" really means...write what your heart knows? Does that sound incredibly corny to you, or it is just me? Sometimes I wish my mind could come up with better "tag-lines", so to speak, but another part of me is tempted to say i don't shiv a git. ;) Either way that one question sparked today's blog post - well, not the beginning part of it! - and I'm still thinking about it today.

As I was relaying to my fellow 'sister' on Facebook today - and fellow occasional blogger! - considering what I write primarily about A) Old houses B) Thunderstorms and tornadoes C) Oklahoma D) Small towns and E) New England...how the hell can I take the phrase "write what you know" literally? I have never directly experienced or really 'know' any of these things! Well, only in my head that is, which may count on some levels, but most of those are in fiction writing. So then I started thinking, what if it is what is in the heart? After all, if I've written about old houses, Oklahoma, thunderstorms, tornadoes and New England since middle school, hell there's got to be something of that red muscle buried in each of those subjects somewhere right?

The only problem is, is that along with a seemingly sourceless passion for all said subjects, my heart forgot to inform my brain on even the basic facts on any of them. Or each just came with a pre-assembled frame or apparatus - to quote my great aunt! - without any instruction manual so if it breaks or happens to fall apart, I'd be left scrambling to figure out how the hell to piece it back together, or its like buying a house without physically seeing it and yet stepping onto the threshold and realizing it was everything you ever wanted, even before you've glimpsed all those rooms silently waiting beyond your line of sight.

Now, don't get me wrong, I know I could do research and what not, but honestly? It's all a big bore to me. And that leads me back to my sometimes-cumbersome writing style, which is basically plant my fingers on the keyboard, open up all the lines from those rusted, over-filling filing cabinets in my head to each finger and let the papers fly! Then possibly...maybe...sort them out later once they've fallen onto the digital paper before me on the smudged screen of my laptop. So what then, you ask? Am I forever doomed to being in the dark when it comes to what I love to write about but know nothing about? My answer to that is...hopefully no! I do intend some day to own an old house that is crumbling away and restore it, and I do wish to bear witness to a violent thunderstorm and hopefully glimpse a tornado, and yes, I do hesitantly wish to live in Oklahoma or New England, whether it be in the isolated countryside or a town so small the population number doesn't even need a comma, or three numbers.

Why my heart picked such things to love and leave my head glaringly empty with the basic facts? Well perhaps its irony, or a way to nudge me from my stubborn, fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants writing style and actually dig my trowel deeper into that loamy soil until I find something solid, perhaps the beginnings of a root, of a passion, of something I can learn about from its beginnings. I sense another rambling coming on, and I also sense a looming bedtime. Better stop this horse while I can still see the house amidst these frollicking pastures bending the golden rays of evening's light.

Another cassette in the tape deck of my life

(Photo property of Google) It's ironic when you think about it, but whenever I download music onto my iPod more often than not it's from the 90's, late 80's and sometimes when I cast aside my cynical eye on music of the 2000's, I'll download a few tunes from this decade as well.

Now obviously I'm not the only one who downloads old music onto my iPod, and I also know music from the 80's and 90's isn't all that old, but I guess what I'm getting at is...even as the technology I use to download music, like my iPod Nano - nope, I still don't have an iTouch but they look awesome! - the music I download sure isn't going forward, so to speak, but is instead going backward. How so, you ask? Well, let me tell you!

And here my friends, is where the title for today's post comes in. You see, I love metaphors and use them to describe different aspects of my life. Now I'm sure if you've read my blog regularly you would be familiar with the metaphor I often use to describe my mind, or my conscious, or my memory...which is that rambling, narrow-corridor room of burnt or faded yellow filing cabinets with their overstuffed drawers and dented, rusted doors where all my haphazard thoughts for stories and every day life are crammed in non-alphabetical order and the floorboards upon which each row of cabinets sits sags and the gaps between the floorboards allow random sheets to fall through, and sometimes they become a topic for a novella or blog post. Have I mentioned I love metaphors? Well anyway, the one that I was supposed to be talking about is the one hinted at in today's blog post. I think I first talked about in a failed novella series I tried to write about two or three summers ago called Wide Open Spaces. So long ago was this in fact that I can only remember the metaphor vaguely, but then again I only need a crumpled sheet of paper to fall between those cracks with vague and faded scribblings on it to start something now don't I? And additionally, I'm rambling on about this vague notion aren't I? You're probably waiting for me to get to the point aren't you? Well, the truth is, so am I! Sometimes I think I'm a passive spectator to my own writing, like I'm not even sitting in this chair right now, but as for who is writing? That's a mystery to me, folks!

Instead of saying anyway again, I'll just reveal the mystery to this tape deck metaphor. As I was explaining before some external force took over my keyboard, a while back in a failed novella series I had mentioned somewhere along the line that everyone's life comes with a tape deck, and what I mean by that is - yes, I know more 90's talk! I can't tell you how deep I am in the 90's! - I picture everyone driving along every day in their lives with this huge wall of tape decks behind them, and every day these different tapes play, are they songs? are they moments? are they words? I'm not sure, I guess they could be all of those things and more. But I guess what the main thing that metaphor was about is also what today's post is supposed to be about: recently I've gotten back into the music of David Meece. Now if that name doesn't ring a bell somewhere within the music-loving section of your brain, I wouldn't be surprised, because you see David Meece was a huge Christian/Pop artist in - you guessed it! - the 90's! and when I was younger and learning how to ride my bike without training wheels and failing my parents would bring me to these therapeutic riding programs so I could learn to balance and therefore ride my bike successfully!

Well on the way there and back my parents would play David Meece tapes in their 1994 Dodge Caravan - which my dad still drives, lol! - and I vividly remember those humid, brightly-lit summer days riding in the van - which was still new back then! or more new than it is today, lol - and listening to the music of David Meece, and even after decades of not hearing or purposely seeking out his music online or otherwise, I could still remember the lyrics and that blissful, inimitable sound of the 90's that I love so much and find so inspirational. Well the remembering the lyrics stuff could be due to the fact that I have an uncanny ability to remember song lyrics after only a few times of listening to any one song, but that's beside the point! My mind is like a sponge that only soaks up a certain kind of water, and more often than not it's that murky, questionable stuff that huddles in the potholes of country roads, or the bottom of an unwashed glass at your grandpa's house he somehow keeps looking over every time you visit him.

Why did I get back into David Meece's music? Well I think it all boils down to me wanting to recapture that certain tape deck of that moment of my life. I mean, don't we all look back on our childhoods and want to recapture something, and I guess for me the simplest and most effective way to do that is through music. Now granted, I'm not going to recapture all of the music, only the stuff that I can see myself listening to for decades after, which is why I downloaded several David Meece songs onto my iPodsome modern music residing on my iPod, but it's few and far between, and probably always will be. I guess...and here comes another metaphor folks!!! - when I think about music of the 90's and the music of today I picture myself standing in the middle of a narrow, dilapidated country road that continues ahead of me in its currently crumbling and pockmarked state where leaning wooden and rusting barbed wire fences border it and equally leaning and paint-stripped abandoned houses yearning for a gentle touch and a lingering eye dot its waist-high swaying grasses with their smooth, Summer wind whispers and behind me that same country road broadens and becomes a smooth, glistening blacktopped road that leads to a city jutting and spiraling into the sky where it slices wounds deep and feeds on the blood that pours down, where cars glint sharply in the sun, snarling poison into the air, where bars curl over windows like hooded eyes averting your stare, lips clamping tight so they won't have to utter that single word...hello, and I find myself - obviously! - turning towards that crumbling road, finding beauty in its neglected state, the simpleness of that beauty, and my heart bursts and floods me to my trembling lips with a liquid flow of emotion and I run towards those leaning houses, divided between leaving them as they are and nudging them towards something similar. But then I would run the risk of dragging them into the modern world and that would be unforgivable.

And such is the extent to my obsession with old houses! As you can see. But after all, it is the countryside, old houses, abandoned old houses and old things in general! - like music, cars and whatnot - that have fueled my love of metaphors to begin with. And as a conclusion!! Next week I will discuss my future dream of one day living in several different decades - or eras, whatever the heck you want to call them! - at once. Confused? Well, then you'll have to wait 'til next week Wednesday to have clarification! Perhaps I will too. ;)

Wallpaper Dreams

(Copyright of image belongs to me! Corrie)

Peculiarly enough while I sit here trying to figure out how to start writing this week's blog post, fragments of Van Halen's version of Pretty Woman are running through my head. Now that won't sound so random when I say that every morning while I'm getting ready for work I listen to a rock station out of Green Bay, WI on the Internet and subsequently get one song or another played during the time I'm listening stuck in my head for the remainder of the day.

This leads me to a side note, while I was at school during the last spring semester one of my roommates kept complaining of songs she heard getting stuck in her head. So one night while we were sitting in our cramped living room eating dinner together I told her she has a "radio in her head", and since then the term has stuck and she uses it occassionally. Now I'm starting to think I have a radio in my head! I mean, do any of you have that same problem where you hear songs in the morning - or anytime during the day - and then they're in your head all day replaying over and over again like a tape stuck in the tape deck of your car? And it doesn't have to be a song you know either, I've gotten songs I don't know stuck in my head just the same, and those are the worst because it'll be the same refrain replaying, like a roll of film that is actually the same segment of video for four hours straight, and there's nothing you can do to turn it off, or remove your behind from the seat.

Well, that was an interesting diversion wasn't it? You're probably wondering what that has to do with the title of today's post, not the mention the picture, and I promise you! I'm getting to that. In my meandering way, I'm getting to it.

You see, since I first realized I love Victorian homes - and therefore flamboyant, oversized prints - I've been fantasizing of the type of wallpaper prints I can layer my future Victorian house with. And, ta-da!, this is where the picture in today's post comes in! But just as quickly, another diversion. You see, I have this nagging, impuslive habit to buy things according to their color, print or style instead of their functionality, Which, I'm learning, is why I should never go shoe shopping alone. Because I'll just end up with a pair of oh-so-cute strappy, wedge-heel green and tan flower-adorned sandals that are in fact ruthlessly murdering sandals that cut into the insides of my feet beside my big toes and rub  the skin raw there. I've even put those non-slip rubber pad things on my sandals but those don't seem to help either. Well, I didn't start this rambling diversion to complain about a pair of murderous sandals that I bought - although do beware the next time you're in the mindset to buy a pair of cute, summery sandals - I started it to talk about the picture in today's post, which is actually the print on my wallet I got from Target roughly two years ago, or maybe a year? I'm not sure.

Anyway, I not only bought the wallet because it was one of those flat ones so I didn't have to fold my money and spare myself the embarassment of pulling it all out and unfolding it just to see how much I have, but also...because of the print! Like I said before, I've selected many an article of clothing merely because of its print or color - and yet, with that said, I still have no red clothing! - and thus was what drew me to the wallet I still have today. In fact, I believe the moment I saw it I thought what a beautiful wallpaper it would make. Now you might be thinking, isn't it a little dark with the black background? And I would say...no! Because for some inexplicable reason the darker the woodwork, and the darker the wallpaper...the happier I am!

Now, don't get me wrong, it's not any "Victorian gothic" offshoot or anything like that, I simply like deep, rich woodwork and dark wallpaper. And I also know that the darker the wallpaper, the smaller a room feels, but frankly? Whenever I picture my future Victorian house I don't imagine pristine white walls or Heaven forbid! white painted woodwork! I picture sinuous Victorian-era couches and wooden furniture with deep cherry wooden trim and plush, deep red cushions, or maybe a rich purple or golden yellow. I don't care much for white...in general. Except in my future kitchen would I make an exception with the color of the cabinets, but only off-white or cream. I can't stand pure-white cabinets.

Yet, as my fantasies become more indepth where my future Victorian house is concerned, I fear that the interior designer in me will prove to me much like my mind in the way of my writing habits and just go on a whim, constantly riding the edge of that crumbling, narrow country road, head flung back to a great Peter Cetera tune, unawares of the car's haltings and skiddings as it eyes the perilously tilting shoulder rolling and bouncing away from the relative solidness of the road's asphalt in mockingily gay tumbles of rocks and dust. Then again, if that mindset has worked for my novella writing - well, that could be debated now couldn't it? :) - why couldn't it work for my interior design pinings? I mean, no one but myself might find it interesting and that it works as a whole, but I believe there would be something endlessly exciting and mesmerizing about funneling random, tumbling ideas into the glaring, unblinking light of life.

Which is why I really want to pick up a house designing game that I spotted at Best Buy a couple years ago, only problem is it's a hundred dollars, and unfortunately I don't have cash like that just lying around! For many years I have been trying to put the vague designs in my head onto paper, whether it be through drawings or novellas. And let me tell you, the novellas have been far more successful than the drawings! I love drawing houses, but I have major perspective issues, and until I can either A) Take some drawing classes on specifically houses or buildings or B) Get a drafting table I believe the problem will never be fixed. And perhaps my yearnings to translate interior room designs through my stories by way of rambling, dilapidated Victorian - and sometimes non-Victorian! homes - is part of the explanation for why I habitutally insert so much detail into my novellas, because I yearn to communciate every detail of every room to my readers. But of course I'm writing like that for myself, not for them, or for you either!

So, you might ask, are these blog posts for us, the readers? or for you? the blog poster? Well essentially I began this blog because I had to, continued it because I wanted to, and write about what I do because I enjoy putting my ideas out there for others with shared interests to communciate, and also to see what others have to post in their own blogs. Because blogs, like houses, are highly personalized and reflect so much of their owners, whether they know it or not. Which - insert another self-reflective question here! - is perhaps why I love houses, and old houses at that, so much? After all, historical houses have had many centuries to collect and absorb the good and bad of many personalities, and like an old favorite coat of your grandpa's in the mothball closet, it too carries memories and stories with it, some blatant on the surface, and others buried deep, waiting for you to discover, to step over the threshold, whether it be real or figurative.

Every old house has a story...I wish I knew yours

(Copyright of image belongs to me: Corrie, 6/12/11)

Tonight's blog post regrettably will be short, seeing as how apparently I woke up this morning destined to feel terrible after my break at work at 11:15. But, it wasn't anything a nap - which is a rare occurence I must tell you! - couldn't fix, at least for the most part. A faint headache is still lingering at the nape of my neck like stubborn nighttime fog laying low atop the pointy tips of a dense, blue-green forest even though the faintest of morning light is weaving its thin, sparkling strands into the brightening sky like yellow-white paint leaking slowly onto an all black tapestry, making slow but deliberate progress.

Well, all of that aside, let me tell you the story behind this beautiful, abandoned house I had the luck of stumbling upon! I believe it happened about two to three weeks ago, although the first time I came close to it, I wasn't even sure if it was there and only confirmed its existence later on Google Maps. Which, by the way, is an amazing tool! Whenever I'm bored I can just hop on Google Maps and peruse the dilapidated streets of any place I want! One particularly boring day I cruised around Brooklyn - which for some reason my mind has fixated on as this awesome place, much in the same matter as it has with Oklahoma - and found one of my most beloved architectural icons: the Brooklyn Bridge! And yes, I know what you're thinking. For a woman who claims to love the countryside and balk at city life in general, why is she rambling on so lovingly about New York City? Well because it's New York City! How can you not love it? I dream about some day carrying a professional camera and strolling those ambling, labyrinth-like sidewalks and streets, snapping a picture every few seconds because there would be so much to capture! Plus, I've always had a fascination for decreipt old factory buildings or abandoned hospitals. Creepy? Perhaps, but like approaching the abandoned house in the picture above, I'm positive I could overcome any fears I would have strolling about NYC's abandoned industrial buildings for the sake of that precious photograph my eyes can later wander to again and again when I feel my heart yearning to be in that place again.

So, what was that fear you spoke of earlier? Well, I'll tell you that for all the abandoned houses I've taken pictures of over the years, and regrettably there are few I have actual photographs of, all the others are either crisp or gradually fading inside those vast corridors of rusty, overstuffed filing cabinets in my consciousness, the one in the above picture is the only one I've deliberately approached on my own, and within such close range!

The way my work schedule works out, I only work Tuesday-Thursday, leaving Monday and Friday free. So naturally because it's summer - at least it was, stupid Wisconsin had to go and have a memory lapse and think it's Fall again, but I shall leave the weather rant for another day! - and I don't want to be one of those people who sits on my rear all day holed up inside, I decided to go for a bike ride! Now normally I'm content with traveling the same old paths on my bike, because A) I like going to the places I normally bike to and B) Once I bike beyond the familiar areas my navigational skills take a back seat to my curisoity and "old-house-lookout-mode", sorry but I couldn't think of a better name for it! But lately I've discovered that the same old paths just won't cut it anymore. So a few weeks ago on Monday I decided to go beyond the familiar sidewalks and roads and bike further, I was out for an hour and  half! Thus is how I stumbled upon the narrow country highway the abandoned house above silently sits next to too.

The first time I came across this road I ended up turning down another road leading to a residental area because I wasn't quite sure where I was! Before I turned off of the rural highway I noticed a Cream City brick farmhouse down the way but couldn't make out much more. Of course my heart tugged me in that direction, but one look at the virtually nonexistence shoulder - and crumbling shoulder at that! - of the highway and I opted for the less traveled residental road. However, thanks to Google Maps I ended up discovering that the Cream City brick farmhouse was in fact abandoned, so of course I counted down the days until I could return, and snap some pictures!

Which leads me to the "fear" I mentioned earlier. And it wasn't all just the fear of biking down a narrow country road where the shoulders look like old, dried up pie crusts left to rot and flake away in the sun, it was the mere fact of parking my bike at the head of the overgrown gravel driveway, straddling it while I fished for my camera inside its case, taking it out and holding it before me, and framing the slumbering, blinded farmhouse within its mechanical eye while cars rushed by behind me. Now perhaps it's irrational but the whole time I was there snapping pictures hurriedly, I imagined - and feared - someone would pull over in their vehicle and demand to know what I was doing. Afterall, there were two metal posts set on either side of the driveway with an ominously creaking chain between them bearing a metal sign that said "no trespassing". But I didn't go beyond that, I simply went far enough in so I wouldn't be in the way of the cars flying up and down the highway.

Still, I know I underestimated how it would feel being so close to an abandoned house. I mean, think about it, it's kind of like parking next an unfamilar cemetery and deliberately walking amongst the graves, even though you know no one buried there and the only sounds are the ones you and the wind make, everything else is silent but yet it lives, watching you behind eyes wide shut. And that's a funny phrase isn't it? "Eyes wide shut". When I first heard of the movie with the same title starring Angelina Jolie - albeit I've never seen it, just like most movies unfortunately! - I thought to myself "what an oximoron! How can eyes be wide shut?" But of course now I understand, and I think it's a brilliant phrase! Hence of my use of it just a few sentences before.

Later on, after proclaiming that I had gone to the house and taken some photos, I told my parents that the boarded-up windows reminded me of cataract eyes struggling to see the world shifting slowly like a book whose pages are read by the wind which blew in occassional gusts and funnels that flapped the pages both backwards and forwards, sometimes getting nowhere, other times jumping ahead to nearly the end. All of the house's windows were boarded up, which was a smart thing to do considering what time and nature can do to both painted wood and glass. And the house can also count its blessings that it's made of brick, instead of vulnderable wood which can sag, rot and be stripped of every last shred of paint like a dead animal being skinned for the pleasure of its fur adorning someones bedroom so their feet can swing from their warm bed and find refuge from the chilled, stiff floorboards.

Maybe I had that thought because I've read too many Stephen King novels - of which there is no such thing, right? :) - or maybe it's because I have an overactive imagination, or my fear was just itching for a way to solidify itself in a metaphor so I could get a handle on it.Whatever the reason, I found the metaphor intriguing, and all the more reason to return to the house! Although, I don't know how many more angles I can take pictures from, seeing as how I've stood to the right of it, to the left of it, and in front of it. Obviously I don't want to go beyond the "no trespassing" sign , although there is a part of me that yearns to feel the time-worn brick underneath my fingers and gently touch the brilliant orange poppies that have bloomed along the facade and shadow-laden left side of the house. I also wonder what lays beyond the catract windows with their smooth wooden boards fitted tightly over them. Are the windows the original two-over-two wooden? Are the glass panes intact and wavy? Are the rooms lined with luscious wallpaper or modest paint colors? Is there furniture still standing squat and tall, layered with decades or years of time?

When I see the roof and its relatively unaltered state I wonder how long the house has been abandoned. And thus comes in the title for today's post: "every old house has a story...I wish I knew yours". And I do wish I knew the story of this particular Cream City brick farmhouse. My heart is bursting with the triumph of discovering and returning to an abandoned house on my own, but yet it breaks while still holding together at the thought that it is abandoned and may never be lived in again. The grass in the yard is long and untended, fluttering and undulating in the wind like the tangled mass of a Mustang's mane and tail, the orange poppies stand out in marked contrast with the Cream City brick as a backdrop, there's a long ago fallen down barn in the back, of a smaller size, while another wooden storage shed still stands strong and square, like the house itself.

While perhaps no more pictures may come of this recent and most intriguing discovery, it may come that my mind cannot simply file away the thought of its being there and immortalize the farmhouse into a story, where the boards will peel away from those beautifully preserved windows, the chipping, light gray roof shingles will become a solid, sparkling black, those orange poppies will no longer sway amongst an undulating sea of grass but find it cropped short by the whir of a mower, perhaps an old-fashioned one and the gravel drive will once again feel the crunch of tires or the uneven pounding of feet upon it, all blessed signs that life is returning, and the unblinking stares of time and nature have been hooded for another handful of years, maybe decades, perhaps even centuries. Even as every old house I have encountered crumbles in this life, it can rise strong and steady on its uneven, fieldstone foundation and welcome the new life sketched before it as if it were slumbering all those years it had laid empty and is awakened by a gentle tug and opens its cataract-clouded eyes to a world brimming with color and motion, a world it had almost forgotten, but had stored away in a diligently marked filing cabinet along the most sagging and narrow corridors of its consciousness, where its weight could be felt like an old cat curling into its familiar spot at the foot of your bed, and even after its long since passed you still feel that weight, knowing somehow its still with you, only not in the physical sense but somewhow it feels just as close, it feels right.

Will these fragments ever make a whole?

Yes I know, I haven't written a new post in probably close to three weeks, but the more I thought about it - and pushed my guilt away, actually - I realized that perhaps all those Wednesdays that came and went with me sitting at my computer - at some point during the day, but mostly during the night! Because after all summer is for being outside, isn't it?? - and not opening Blogger and writing a new post, I just wasn't ready to write a new post. And what do I mean by that? Well, it could go several ways. One, and perhaps the most obvious, is that I just couldn't plum think of anything to write about! Now sure there's always that ol' standby well in the back of my mind, where old ideas and shells of others ruminate, generally stinking up the whole place and irritating the fresh, full-bodied ideas huddled away from that mysterious black hole while they simultaneously try to muscle their way through to that breaking point where I snatch them up. But sometimes I guess I don't feel like dropping the dented and rusted bucket into that smelly well and just plopping something down, I want it to be something substantial, and that doesn't mean either that it'll necessarily be one of the 'full-bodied' ideas sitting eagerly on the edge, watching me move about here and there through the cracks in the sagging floorboards beneath.

And another reason why perhaps I choose to wait three weeks to write a new blog post, is that I was waiting for all those fragmented ideas holed up in my mind to make a whole. And ta-da! Here comes the explanation behind the title for today's post! Didn't think I'd get to it so quickly did you? Well, even I have the power to surprise, even myself sometimes. :) Well anyway, lately it's seemed - well lately is a loose word, let me tell you, it's really been all my writing life! - it seems that I no longer write novellas or even stories, somewhere along the line the all-important folder in Microsoft Word on my laptop demoted itself from the catchy Corrie's Stories - Corrie, by the way, is my nickname - to simply Story Thoughts. Oh yes, I know what you're thinking. "Story Thoughts?" I'd insert the confused face I use for Facebook chat but then I'd feel like my texting lingo - of which honestly, since I've gotten a phone with a full keyboard treat it like so and type out full words - is infiltrating my normal, civilized speak and thus would feel honestly freaked out as if I were deep in the troughs of Stephen King's book Christine, of which I am actually, and it's just as amazing as the first time I read it!

Oh dear, I just acted like William Faulkner in that torture-for-the-eyes-and-brain-book-to-read, Absalom, Absalom! where he inserts a dash and then takes off like 0he's whipping a horse with the same rhythm as his hooves beat half-circles into the ground, and when it stands beneath him trembling he realizes he left something unfinished behind, way behind, but he'll be damned if he remembers what it was, and he just shrugs his shoulders and continues, probably at a slower pace, promising himself he won't do it again, but then another idea creeps up on him greedily like a tantalizingly straight and flat road, and the whip raises again, the thought stopping dead behind him and the horse's rear lowers and dirt flies in its face.

I've forgotten how good it feels to ramble on my blog, truly I have. And perhaps this is exactly how Faulkner felt, and even though I'd like to snap his dusty bones in his grave for writing that horrid book, Absalom, Absalom! that I had to read for my English class last semester, I can kind of find common with him, but that common ground feels like reaching an agreement with the enemy on a lumpy, blood-spotted minefield.

Going back to texting-speak for a while, because honestly? I've been seeing way too much of it on Facebook these days, why do some people - and some of them are related to me, God help us all - feel they can use 'texting speak' when commenting? For instance, someone sent me a message on Facebook and usually where people use apostrophes in words like "i'll" and "we'll", they omitted them completely, leaving me to lean forward like an old woman and cock an eyebrow. I mean, really? Is it that difficult to insert a little apostrophe? If you take the time to write out the word to begin with, please insert the proper...oh shoot, I'm an English/Creative Writing major and I don't know what those things are called. I guess I should be saying "God help me" now right? Well, we're not perfect, so I guess I can't rant about my generation - and even those older than me - about using "texting-speak" when they should be using, good ol' fashioned English. Then again, I'm sure there are plenty of you that find it vexing as well. Now maybe I feel so strongly about this because I've never liked texting-lingo to begin with. I mean sure, I'll admit I overuse "lol" so much it's like a deer killed out on a busy highway in Milwaukee during rush hour, pretty soon it's lost its meaning and has become something along with the million other 'somethings' ground deep into that amused and cracked asphalt. But I would never go as far as to omit apostrophes so abbreviate words so much you have to sit there deciphering it like it's some damned code on Lost. Texting has killed the English language, and although I'm not really doing that much of my part to sustain it other than refraining from using 'texting-speak' in my own texts, and ranting about it here, I find it interesting how when something is invented to make something else easier, there's always a repercussion, sometimes building over several generations until we stand here today, scratching our heads while we read Facebook comments, or watch some teenager struggle to sign their name in cursive. Speaking of which, I won't even go there. Whenever I have to sign my name, my left-hand cringes and just tightens up so all I can do is write out my first name and the "D" in my last name and then scribble the rest in a vague line of ups and downs like the water line lapping against a boat, hinting at something.

Can one achieve hindsight within the same blog post? Because I feel like I did, just now, while my mind rummages over the multi-topic rant in the above paragraphs. But, I don't feel bad about, because like I said, it feels good to rant in my blog again, it's like sitting inside your car, the doors shut tight while you blaze down some long-dead country road singing screechingly to some song at the top of your lungs, perhaps beating the dust off of the steering wheel or the dashboard like its a slumbering, ancient relic of a piano and with just the right slap will come to life and pound the tune out with you in all the same awkwardness. It's a familiar place, a place where the seat is shaped like you, smells like you, and even bears the myriad stains of when you thought you could eat that meatball marinara sub from Subway on your break, or drink a McDonald's Frappe without it tipping over in the cup holder while you navigated those narrow, city streets.

But I guess, in my usual rambling, loosely-organized way, I'm coming back to the topic of today's post, which as always, bears a rhetorical question! Which conveniently happens to be in the title itself! "Will these fragments ever make a whole?" As a partial answer to that question - I know, I know, more fragments right? :) - while I was laboring against the wind and fighting the heavy, metal frame of my ill-suited mountain bike while riding out to a beautiful old, abandoned farmhouse I found (perhaps talked about in next week's blog post!) I thought about random metaphors I could use for different points I wanted to get across. Do I however, remember any of them? Of course not! It's like a radio dial spinning beyond your control - perhaps it never was in your control in the first place - in your car, offering up snippets of songs, screams, random laughter, serious political talk or any number of things, and whether you liked them or not, it would keep on spinning, that little red needle doing a dance across the numbers like it was performing a tightly choreographed routine and each step was a number on the floor.

I mean, it's not like I'll always have a pen and pencil with me to write the darn things down, you know? So why do they come to me? The feeling is sort of like rushing past in a vehicle and spotting and a deliciously dilapidated house sulking way back in the woods, and realizing you neither have your camera, nor have time to stop, and might never see the house again, and all you'll be left with then is a maddening wisp like cigarette smoke lingering in a bar long closed down, and even though the windows are gutted and the roof is a thinning scalp of shingles and beams, the building still retains its smells, although its not solid anymore, but like the wind that weaves between the things it has stilled, something that lays low in your mind, clinging to an invisible, mental spiderweb woven there by time.

Well, I guess there's your metaphors for you, although their not exactly the one's I thought about on my bike ride. But, like I said, it doesn't much matter, because I'll think about other one's anyway, as was just exemplified!

Perhaps its the whole 'no-fences' mentality I have towards writing my novellas that keeps me from finishing anything, or approaching any writing idea - whether it be a novella or a blog post! - with a solid frame already laid solidly in my mind like the deep-set foundation already marking its place in the ground, patiently waiting for the walls to press down around it. While I can remember whole houses I've spotted over the years and haven't seen in person for probably several, when it comes to sitting down here at my desk and writing on this laptop, stepping onto the first crumbling steps of another house, another world waiting beyond the threshold, I don't see a solid foundation, I don't even see a crumbling one. It might just be a distinguishing feature, a cigarette pulled away from the lips, an old Ford wagon ambling down a narrow country road while the driver listens placidly to the fields whispering back and forth to each other, or maybe it's a house itself, but it'll only be the decorative capitals at the tops of the soaring, two-story columns or a delicate three-story turret rising importantly above an equally striking but dilapidated Victorian. Each novella I write is like an unassembled stained glass window and somehow, without fences, without trails of lead, without a sturdy, richly-hued cherry wood, carved window frame, I have to put those random fragments of deeply-colored glass and fit them into an invisible frame, so when I write that last word, I can step back and find that it all fits. Of course, I'll have to make minor adjustments here and there, but as a whole it must fit, and look beautiful when the golden, full-bodied light of evening tumbles through it like a Friesians mane billowing in the wind, the wind itself seeming to get tangled in its silken depths and pulse within the black depths like sunlight sparkling beneath the gently ebbing waters of the coast.

See? Why was I so worried, and frustrated at that, of having random, juicy metaphors flitting in and out of my mind when all of those just came tumbling out? Anyway, I believe another one of the things that lead to me renaming that folder in Microsoft Word Story Thoughts is because when I start on one story, I may be standing solidly on that first step, but that doesn't mean I won't step off to do other things and suddenly...down this road and that, sitting in the hollow of a valley, or atop a balding hill will be another house, sometimes more tantalizing, sometimes more imposing, both are compelling to me. But again, it will be just a fragment, and obviously I have discovered that is all I need. Now, don't get me wrong, just as my heart goes out to any abandoned house I've stumbled upon, so do the novellas I've 'left-behind', so to speak, sit silently and waiting in the back of my mind, some gripping the edge of that well, others far from it, but none of them forgotten. I often thought it amusing and quiet peculiar that all of the characters in stories both new and old reside in one place...my mind. I like to think of it as all of the dilapidated farmhouses they live in - and believe me, they all do live in such houses! - all crammed onto a single country lot, forming one of those hideously added-on-to historical homes where the current owners and the several before them paid no mind to the house's heritage, to what the outside of it looked like even though they were gaining perhaps much-needed space on the inside. Now, granted, the particular old house I'm referring to, wouldn't undergo such monstrosities, after all I am an old house fanatic far more than probably even I realize! After all (I apologize for using that word again so soon!) most of my metaphors pertain to old houses don't they? Why do I feel like I have a knack for stating the obvious?

Well, there you go, if I may abruptly switch gears while you tighten your seat belt against the lurching of the vehicle around you and the grinding of the gears in your ears, that's what three week's of pent-up ideas will do to a person. I think the creativity outlet is smoking by now. Then again, it's better than not plugging into it at all, right? ;)