Shouts From Down Under

The whirlpool of someone else's muck puddle. Regurgitated.

Sucked into someone else's pile of trash or mediocre style isn't a good idea at any time, but I think it's even worse if we've had the goods, done the hard yards, had the nitty gritty in our hot little hands, and then given in to pressure, criticism, self doubt, or just let our standard down.

Recently, I was prompted to think about the whole reason why a lot of us write. Well, I think it's the reason anyway. You may have the same reason but just not considered it in this angle before.

There is an immense freedom we have as writers. And when we've written something good, written it by ourselves, on our own, and finished it, and it's GOOD (ok maybe with help of editing and beta readers, but still) we feel 10 feet tall. We really do. It's a feeling like no other. I'd even go so far as to risk saying its even better than the other three letter thing. Come on - you know what I mean. At least the euphoria from writing our own stuff, and it being not just good but readers rave over it, well, that feeling lasts a lifetime. A lot more value than a brief interlude. (Ok I'm running away from crowds of gainsayers, screaming for mercy but I think it's a fair comparison even so.

I asked myself today,

"Why am I picking up someone else's recycling off the ground? Why? Why me? How did this ridiculous situation come to be?"

It was like asking why the sky is blue. No answer came from the chickens. No answer came from Honey the dog, and Romeow the cat wasn't even there to supervise me like he normally does.



He tries to convince us that he isn't into our lives at all, just happens to be in the house and by chance lies in front of the heater on cold, windy and rainy nights. (Like the last six months of them). Yes, the heater? Oh. Is there a heater? he asks. No, he didn't notice. It must have been put there AFTER he lay there relaxing. We don't own cats, in case you didn't know. They condescend to own us, sometimes. If they feel like it.

This cleaning up of other people's errant recycling, ie beer cans, cardboard and newspaper, with the odd empty milk container thrown in, (or out?) came about because there was this forecast, see?

Extreme weather. They said. You'll have gust. They said. So, would you put out your wheelie bins then? Lots of people did. Overnight. With a gale coming. Hmmm. If you wrote this in your story, an editor would disagree and shout at your face,

"NO! People aren't THAT stupid! You tweaking twat! Write something worthy!"

Anyway, I'm getting a bit windy myself in this blogentry. That should be one word these days. So, other people put their bins out, but we didn't until in the morning, when we had the FORESIGHT that it would probably be calmer, and the recycle truck doesn't come until after 10am or later.

So there was bins all over the place, and people's rubbish, and recycle. The recycled stuff isn't bagged. And of course, our house yard doesn't have a front gate in the driveway and acts like a huge funnel, guiding everyone else's party trash straight up into our yard, and against the back fence. Some of the many puddles in the driveway caught the newspaper.

As I cleaned it up, I saw the obvious connection and decided to blog about it, in the dim and foggy hope that it might help some other writer, who may be mostly as clueless as I. Particularly on some days. Sometimes, I think I need to up my medication. I just seem to be blank as the white substrate that surely, life and each moment of space time matrix is hung on, that blurpy material that the time continuum squidges along on, like a giant cosmic water slide for the kiddies.



Yes, I definitely need to take more tablets. There has to be a joke about a computer technology convention where everyone went silly, cos they forgot to take their tablets. Hmmm. I'd be accused of a DAD joke if I said that here. The same as nobody laffed and one person said it was sick when I posted a joke I thought up, (I THOUGHT UP!)

Why are doggie do's always a spiral? Cos every time they "go" they look for the loo paper. What?

I really must stop it with the jokes. Get serious about not writing using other people's recycled crap.

Yes they've had a party. Yes it was fun. Yes it was noisy. Yes the police were called by an unimpressed neighbor. And Yes, you were not invited even though you've been neighbors for years. (Maybe that isn't necessarily drawing such a bad conclusion)

But this stuff is the refuse after the party someone else had. It's USED UP. It just smells of stale beer, cigarettes and someones hangover regrets, if you're lucky. Dude. The Party wasn't yours.

And neither is someone else's writing. Yes, be impressed, enjoy, get ideas, be prompted, look at it, enthuse about them, feel all soft and gooey, even get emotional and pull out a screwed up wad of tissues to PARP!! into. You know, cry a bit.

But. Just like I got our recycle bin, and collected up their trash from our yard (just like you scrape other people's second hand ideas, and their garbage out of your writer's mind), loaded it into our as yet still full wheelie bin, and put it out for collection. In the calm sunny morning. The truck came within the hour.

What frightens me is that sometimes our ideas are good. And we use them, but not long after, seems like the universe plots against us sometimes, I kid you not, someone else has already thought it up.

That's the one good thing about being on medication for a loopy head. Surely no one could think up some of the weirdness that I do. And maybe some of that lost recycle on our lawn WAS our own.

Things happen. And people build some interesting stuff out of recycled materials, so maybe this whole blog could go in the recycledness of your head and you could do a nifty fiddle and...

http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/17/15965768-a-way-out-of-the-landfill...



And there it is. I've just recycled someone else's transcendence, their virtue, their quality and greatness into another web log. Seems good enough to me. Just disregard everything I said OK?

Sparky