Tag Archives: my father said

Finding the Write Point of Entry

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Writing is all about the entry point, how to get to that nucleoid of inspiration. Is it a memory of being a wide-eyed kid, digging through the rotten green wooden box at the back of the garage? Flipping Ian Potter’s desk in History class after he smashed my plasticine Jaws Boat? Or crying, football helmet still on, when the final cuts were announced? Or the obnoxious young adult demanding white wine at a beer hall in Munich?

Wise thoughts under thick hair

Or is it the slipstream of dreams, late for the train, cutting around wheel chairs, finding a bathroom on a balcony, children hovering over a featherless parakeet, a tortured young woman pitching a documentary about first love, late for dinner with my dead parents who say nothing and leave before they pay the bill?

Beginning to feel regret

Or is it all high fallutin’, how we never got past the tragedies of the Greeks because whatever we’ve got, it’s just keys to a rental car, LPs in the trunk, everything achieved, everyone known, all that zippity nil, remembering those things, throwing up, waiting to die. Yeah, that’s probably the one.

Life is Work and Work is Life

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I’m coming back from two weeks in New Orleans where I was tired and uninspired and did very little writing. Instead, I read and drank and walked around. “It’s good for you,” I was told time and time again. But it didn’t feel that way. It felt like life was pointless. I felt desperate.

My father always said that if you don’t like work, you’re not going to like life. Jim Henson concurred: “I love to work. It’s the thing that I get the most satisfaction out of – and probably what I do best. I think much of the world has the wrong idea of working. It’s one of the good things in life. The feeling of accomplishment is more real and satisfying that finishing a good meal or looking at one’s accumulated wealth.”

The idea of being idle, either enjoying the company of family and friends or, worse, in retirement, are presented as goals in our society, a tendency toward inertness that has been furthered by our self-destructive attraction to our screens and just be generally stupid.

My dream is to be like Henson and my father, to be working until the end, projects on the go, one close to completion, others in production, another one or two in development, and then getting up from a table, moving onto another thing, I just don’t make and am no more.