Tag: WITR

writing in the raw: you. yeah. YOU.

Let’s get the terms straight.

THEY::: those who want to exploit the masses expressly and exclusively for their own self-interests.

YOU::: the one they have believing this is about somebody else: the foreclosures. the job loss. the fascism.  

Writing in the Raw: The “End” Will Be The Beginning

On my walk to the train early Tuesday morning, I realized that my apartment building has a new resident.  Or at least the property does…

He sleeps wrapped up in a blanket in the 18 inches or so between our building’s far northwestern corner and the bush that runs along the edge of the sidewalk.  At first glance, it’s easy to mistake the man for an abandoned pile of clothing.  I’m sure that’s by design, and frankly I doubt even I would have noticed him at all if I hadn’t dropped my keys in my early morning stupor.

And now that I’ve gotten my personal matters straightened out again; and I will finally leave this miserable neighborhood for good in 6 weeks to single-handedly multiply the Coolness Factor of SE Hawthorne by a factor of 10…I wonder where this man will go from here?  Will he stay out this way for long?  Will anybody else “catch him”?  Does he even care?  Does he have anything to lose?

I wonder about this man’s life…but I’m never going to wake him.  Does anybody ever think about him?  Now, or in the recent past?  Besides me, of course…

A wife?  Kids?  Parents, brothers, sisters…nieces, nephews?

Does he know that somebody’s writing about him right now?

writing in the raw: strange taboos

In a Country with Strange Taboos

by dharmasyd

For rusty1776 in gratitude for his

“Writing in the Raw: Valentine Confessions”

I remember when you brought me hyacinths

We walked the path under pepper trees

Laughed our way to the beach

To play in the surf like yearling seals

And when you kissed me, your salt wet curls

Dripped ocean on my face

I was a virgin then, and you a married man

In a country with strange taboos

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Camille Claudel

Writing in the Raw

NotPipeRotateYes, that’s correct, I’m one of those anal retentive writers who believe in spelling and capitalization and punctuation and grammar.  Links lend credibility and context.

Sometimes people mistake my style for stream of consciousness.  They would be surprised to learn that almost everything is outlined and constructed.  What I do is tell stories, like Garrison Keillor or Mark Twain or Dashiell Hammett.  Because most of them do in fact come from personal experience while they have a middle, they seldom have a firm beginning or end; though I am always trying to make a point.

In the beginning.  Where is that exactly?  First the Earth was formed, then the dinosaurs came and Jesus rode them like ponies.  Homer started his poems in medias res and at the beginning we are on the shores of Troy or Ithaca and have the great relief for the rest of the tedious tale that our hero makes it that far at least, so we have no serious concerns for his welfare.

Much of the rest may seem mere wandering flashbacks but because the reader has peeked ahead they are assured they will eventually get somewhere.

So every essay is also all about process as long as you learn from it.

Here I’ve been experimenting with form, trying to write shorter, and more political, and shorter AND more political.  An ideal Front Page piece will have 200 to 500 words and at least one graphic or blockquote for visual interest. That’s about 4 or five paragraphs.  Not much time to get to the point.

WITR-Rattlers

Although I had lived, and hiked, and backpacked in the Southwest for twenty or so years, encounters with rattlesnakes were pretty rare. If one sees snakes at all, they’re usually stretched across a trail or road.  I had sure never encountered one where it posed a problem, like crawling into someones sleeping bag. The closest anyone I knew ever came was when I was hiking with my nephew, he once sat on a large large rock that had a rattler underneath.  When it rattled, he moved.  This is generally considered appropriate behavior.  He might have been maybe a little too excited,  and ran much farther than he needed to, but the move-away–leave-it-alone strategy is all one really needs to do in most cases.  The people that do get bitten are usually young, drunk, and male.  

Most people in rural areas with great hideouts like barns and woodpiles, will usually handle rattlesnake encounters with matter-of-fact blowing them away with a shotgun.

I somehow got a job at a nature sanctuary near a small town and moved there from Tucson.  I had been a volunteer for a few years and Jerry, the manager, finally had the funding to hire some help.   Meetings with rattlesnakes increased.

writing in the raw: the velveteen rabbit

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“What is a LEADER?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“A LEADER isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. It’s realizing that every experience develops some latent force within you.1 You begin to understand that vision is the art of seeing the invisible2 so that when you want to build a wagon, you don’t gather the other toys to collect wood or assign them tasks, but rather you teach them to long for ways to traverse the endless immensity of the backyard.3 Then you become a LEADER.”

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writing in the raw: what i love

there are times for anger. and action. there are times for confusion and catastrophe. there used to be… time for love.

yet is seems much of my time has been spent feeling overcome by the weight of so many bad things happening all at once that it….

… makes me forget why i’m so angry… because i love.

or why i feel this need to fight against changing winds, rising seas, cultural hatred, and eve_vree_thing else that darkens the sun… because i love

writing in the raw: stop.making.sense.edition.

If you’re ready to stop making sense… then take a jump below the fold…

part II

writing in the raw: it’s my nature

love.death.love.death.love.sex

before my 16th birthday, my dad took me out for dinner. he said he figured it was time for the “sex” talk. whoo boy.

so we’re at dinner and i say, dad i know about sex… haven’t had it yet, but like i know about it.

he says i only wanted to tell you this one thing: don’t ever let anybody fuck you. if you want to fuck them, that’s fine. but don’t EVER let anybody fuck you.

holy shit. what did he just say?

and then we both started laughing.

my father gave me one hell of a gift: the knowledge and confidence to own myself. to own my decisions. to be my own person.

yeah, you own yourself and you give yourself… don’t ever let anybody take anything you are unwilling to give.

but when you let go, let giving yourself be a completing act. because it’s love we all want, so make it about loving somebody.

then sex is a playground, an archeological dig. it’s absurd, a comedy, a vacation of hours… it’s making poetry in grunts and groans. it’s about that slow reveal… the getting there…


maybe, when we stop letting others define us

maybe, when we stop letting life define us

maybe, when we start defining ourselves

we’ll stop creating worlds in which we hate to live

writing in the raw: leave-your-facts-at-the-door edition

Facts… silver bullets in the war against the ignorant, the uninformed, and the intolerant.

Facts. That’s all we need. Forget love, faith, religion, God, even reason or logic. It’s all about the facts. Why can’t these damned neocons and wingnuts just ACCEPT the fucking FACTS???

writing in the raw: where IS melvin?

i don’t have much tonight. i thought i’d write about writing on the blogs. like how to structure these essays or diaries. how to make them work better. but suddenly, i don’t want to anymore. I want to jam about Jay Elias’s essay, Of Politics and People

Many of you may wonder why I have been so dogged with my “Quotes for Discussion” posts over the last year.  I usually offer them up without context or commentary, and they are tangential to the point of the sites where I post them at best.  Further, few people, including few of you, bother to read them or discuss them.  And even more, sometimes the quotes, and my purpose in posting them, is very hard to gather.  So, I’ll tell you why.

I post those quotes to remind us about people, and to try to get people to think about them, often in a different way than usual for politics.  Because it is easy to speak of political policy and strategy without thinking about these things, about the crucial role that people will have in them.

It is my belief that most political programs and ideas fail because they are not conceived or implemented with people in mind.

emphasis mine (and also a bit out of order of the original)

And I want to go on about Delivery in jessical’s Pony Party: Oh Superman, In a Box.

writing in the raw: the power of one

Horror happens every day… and it can shrivel your very soul. This is dedicated to those among us defying the horror.

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