Days Forty Eight to Fifty Four: Knitting and Puzzles and Attics, Oh My!

Day 48: I'm a dork, so sometimes when I'm alone and surrounded by a particularly lovely day or night, I'll compose a short song on the spot. This is fun because you're creating something that belongs solely to that moment. This is one I vaguely remember:

The shadows of trees cast green and gray clouds on the lawn
As I sit in the glorious sun of a day half-beginning, half-gone...

Another I recall:

There is sunlight on the grasses
Of the fields where I have grown up
And it makes me feel so happy,
Yes it makes me feel alive.

Sometimes, like those two, I remember them easily later. Maybe they have a particularly catchy melody or the words just stick in my head somehow. But countless others songs created like that vanish as quickly as the moment that inspired them.

On Day 48, the moon was huge. Not quite full, but the world outside was blue and bright. So I sang to it. It wasn't a particularly novel lyric, but it was nice. I didn't write it down, though, and have since forgotten the specifics of it.

Here's a recreated "guess":

Great, wise guardian of the night
Thank you, thank you for your light
Day has left and dark is here
But still I feel no fear.

This may not be a heavenly tune
But it's my song for you, dear moon.
Thank you, thank you for your light
That guides me onward in the night.

Day 49: I'm not much good at drawing, but sometimes I stumble onto good luck. I was considering trying to illustrate a little side project that may show up as some of my Good Madness in the future, but before I did this I wanted to see if I could draw a decent kid/knight. These doodles are some of my best attempts:



Day 50: I worked some on a knitting project I'd started ages ago. I meant to give it as a going-away present to a former boss, but said boss has since already gone away, so I'll have to figure out something else to do with it.



Day 51: A while ago I put up an excerpt from a story I'm writing about time travel. I worked more on that today. Here's another excerpt:

I am, of course, in Time as I write this, and you also are within it, further down the river, reading. I guess that makes these words a strange kind of time travel.

What that means is that I cant give you an adequate description of what it’s really like in a place without Time. I’m limited by the language; I have to pick a tense—past, present, future—when none will do. But if you’ll pardon these weaknesses in my prose, I’ll try to tell you what happened next.

First, blinding pain. Inside my head. I can say with conviction and truthfulness that it happened (verb, past tense) because Time still existed as a memory in my brain, if nowhere else outside my mind. The agony. I mentioned a headache before. If you’ve ever had a migraine, you’re closer to the mark, but imagine taking that and magnifying it ten times. Make that a hundred. It was hard to move—if you can call it moving—or to function at all.

Timelessness has a landscape, though again words are limited in describing it. There are things there. There are Beings. There are colors, and what’s cool is that there are colors out of Time that don’t exist within it. The closest I’ve gotten to seeing those colors within Time is while listening to music. A certain swell, a certain harmony or arrangement of notes, and it’s like the color is there, pressing close against the surface of my reality, like a hand pressed flat against glass. My mind almost—almost—grabs hold of it, but it passes backwards and away again in the space of that split second, as the song moves on, measure after measure, the metronome marking the beat like a prison drum.

It could have been all over for me then. Not that anyone would have noticed. Passing from phobia to psychosis, truly losing my grip on reality, would be apparent only to me. To the world outside I was already a nut job. But I mean it. I honestly have no idea how I made it back that first time. Bombarded by the searing pain of a brain not used to existing in Timelessness, disoriented by alien sights and experiences both beautiful and frightening, it was nothing short of a miracle that I was able to gather my thoughts, to remain collected, to envision the natural rhythms of Time and make the leap back in, without doing permanent damage to myself. For a first-timer with no previous exposure to the theory or protocol of the procedure—well, like I said: a miracle.

I arrived back in that moment, the gray moment, on the floor of my bedroom, and the tears started, and I was shaking, and I fumbled for the pain pills on my nightstand. I lay trembling after that, as the grayness shifted and grew more pale. As light descended on the world, I fell into sleep, my mind replaying the things I had just experienced, visions of the impossible.

Day 52: There's this kind of puzzle I love doing that's known as O'ekaki, or Paint By Numbers. It's similar to Sudoku in that you have a grid that you're trying to fill in. It's different, however, in that you aren't filling the boxes with numbers. The numbers are around the edges, and they provide clues that, if decoded properly, help you find the picture in the grid. Each number tells the size of a segment of blocks to fill in on that particular line. By determining which to fill in, and which to leave blank (I denote these with an "X") you solve the puzzle. I've been enjoying solving them for a while, but I wondered how hard it would be to create one. It turns out: VERY. After about five tries, i came up with the very simple O'ekaki puzzle you see below:

Before:



Solved:



Days 53 and 54: I'm lumping them together because I worked on the same thing both days. It's a story I'm writing that's related to the House-Between-Worlds story I told you about before. In fact, if I get my act together they may all be part of the same book one day. I don't want to give away too much plot, but here's a paragraph to give you a taste of what I've been working on:

We’ve been given no names for this world we find ourselves in. We’ve been denied the basic privilege of education. That is to say, what education we get is of Em’s choosing. We are taught what we’d need to know of this place if captured, or if going out to scout. What history we know is mainly our own, of the first rash action with the Door, and how that has led to our misery. What more I’ve learned is from books snatched secretly from attics then hastily returned. Staying up long days reading while my fellow travelers slept. And the photo albums, the sketches. This is how I know about the wars of this world. I read about presidents and princes, dictators and diplomats. And I see firsthand from those photographs just how quickly humans fade to dust.

And finally... a couple weeks ago one of my Good Madness projects involved selecting photographs and formatting a free photo book from Shutterfly. It arrived in the mail! While I can't show every page, here's one:

Day Forty Seven: Reinterpretation

Several years ago in a poetry class I took in college we were asked to attempt to write a postmodern poem. The idea with postmodern poetry is nothing should really have anything to do with anything else... it should be random, disjointed and dreamlike, sometimes disturbingly so. This applies not only to subject matter but to line length and sentence structure as well. The idea is to make a statement by not making a statement. That kind of thing.

This is what I came up with back then:

Twenty-hour Robotics
by Grace Dow

A cat crawls into the sewer. Poison ivy.
Skateboard to the edge of the globe.
Goldfish in a puddle, F-Critical,
is the distribution if you find
the z-score and the t-star.
Blood mint. Rejectful metronome.

Funny goes. Winks an angel to the tree.
Grave stones reeling to the underbelly. Pigeons.
Dream-jump over a brick wall onto needles or
speak Greek to the crazies. What the heck?

The blink's the root, but no white flashes
crease space with canonical care.

Serrated gun. And then another sings,
refusing antihistamines. Bug in the network server.
If you travel
by car or backwash you rework the phantom.

Greenly lives the octopus, preening,
but baby mobiles require optimistic, do-it-yourself.
So the plum said to the graying weasel,
Was one negative?
Autocorrelate the pattern. That cuticle reeks.
He would want to look. Heteroskedasticy.

Once the percent excluded the word.
There isn't a pattern.
Eat now. She's a decent girl. Thumb
the web between worms.


Recently I came across that poem again while moving some files between computers. Some of the images stuck in my mind, so much so that later that evening I wrote this, my Good Madness for Day 47:

It started that morning, with the cat crawling out of the sewer.

It was a drainage grate along the curb. I saw clumps of matted fur and flash of claws and teeth and crazy eyes. The thing wriggled and dragged itself up onto the street. It was caked in filth and what looked like blood and its tail seemed barely attached to its body. It trailed behind like a scrap of crimson-stained cloth held on by the thinnest of threads.

Twenty minutes later I was outside the bakery where I usually get my morning coffee on the way to class. I looked down at the sidewalk, in a low dip near the building where a puddle had formed. There was a goldfish in the puddle, swimming around as happily as could be, oblivious to the fact that it was a goldfish swimming in a freaking puddle which pretty much equals you are going to die very soon in the grand equation of things.

These were signs. Signs that something terrible was on its way. The apocalypse. The end of civilization as we know it. Or at the very least, the end of my life. But I didn’t notice, or I didn’t connect the dots, as many insanely weird dots as there were.

Like walking past the music studio where students come for lessons on how to play various musical instruments. There was a metronome clacking back and forth in the window as a girl played her flute along to the beat. But as I walked past, the clacking noise stopped. I looked up. The metronome was swinging, but only insomuch as it seemed to be trying to bowl itself over, to fly through the window at me. Jerking from its center in only the one direction, like it had a magnet in its tip.

Like the way the trees seemed to wait until I’d walked past them to rustle and whisper and shake in the breeze.

Paranoid, yes. But I’ve earned the right to be.

There was an angel in my dream last night, and it wasn’t the kind of angel with pretty feathered wings and a golden halo. No cupids, and no Christmas tree toppers either. It was human-like in general form, but it was alien and strange. It was a voice-of-God kind of angel, the scary kind, the kind you can’t really ever quite look at straight on. Except it looked. That was the dream. It was approaching, and I kept saying in my dream, “No, it isn’t right. I shouldn’t be seeing you like this,” and yet it kept coming anyway. And it floated right up to me (it had feet and yet it never walked) until its face was mere inches from my own and I looked up and it looked at me.

It looked at me.

THOSE. EYES.

I cannot impart to you the dread in those eyes. It knew where I was and it could kill me in an instant. It was not my friend, and I was not worthy, and yet I saw those eyes.

It was going to speak, and I prepared myself for the trumpet blast, but something tickled on the back of my neck, and that was enough to jerk me into wakefulness, and the angel, so vivid in my dream, was banished from the reality of my room in the darkness.

So just imagine my surprise… okay, don’t imagine. Laugh at me. Laugh at me for being surprised, when all manner of signs come before me: the cat clawing its way up from the sewer, the fish swimming in its tragic and temporary home, the metronome, that insistent, obsessive metronome.

When I reached the main outdoor plaza between the dining hall and the building where my first class met, I saw it. Looking out across the field of students playing ultimate Frisbee or lounging in the shade of trees and pretending to do homework, I saw a figure. Standing rigid, far too rigid to be a college student. Completely still, in fact. Unmoving.

I looked up and saw those eyes.

THOSE. EYES.

It was the angel from my dream, and yet terror that dark and blinding can’t be a thing of heaven.

It was yards away from me. I made a slight motion as if to turn around. No one from that distance should have been able to even see me move. Yet that nearly-human head slid from side to side in a warning.

And suddenly the metronome in my mind swung the other way, and it was as if it was pulling me closer.

We claw ourselves up, or we delude ourselves into thinking we have some kind of promise of forever, but our lives are already dictated for us. We may play freestyle, but it’s always to a beat.

My heart skipped a beat.

I should have known. I should have known.

And suddenly it’s there, inches away from me. And I raised my face and looked into those eyes.

Some Days the Madness Doesn't Feel So Good

When I started this project I knew it wouldn't be easy. I knew I may not even finish it. I even built the likelihood of failure (my "freebie days") into the rules I set up from the very beginning. So far I've been lucky in that I'm able to say honestly that I haven't failed: so far I've managed to keep it up, to create something new every day. But one thing that's kind of obvious but I hadn't given much thought to is this: oftentimes the "madness" isn't good.

So before I get into the list of things I've produced these past few days, let me just throw something out there. I don't mean it as an excuse, but just as an observation.

One of the main reasons I decided to do this Good Madness project is because I have a tendency to not really get things done unless there's a deadline. Taking writing in college was an absolute blessing for me. Having someone demand that I write, and frequently, turning in something by thus-and-so date, taking critiques and feedback and changing things to turn them in again for reevaluation by thus-and-so other date... I got stuff done. Sometimes not until the night before the work was due - and often not until 4 or 5 in the morning on those nights - but still... I. GOT. IT. DONE. And something else surprising: when there was that level of desperation to get it done in time, to not fail or get a bad grade or whatever, astonishing things happened. I produced certain stories I had no idea were ever in me. Characters popped up out of nowhere. Phrases, sentences, whole paragraphs where I thought, Whoa, someone else has to be writing this because I have no idea where that came from.

It's fun to surprise yourself.

But now college has been over for nearly four years. I have ideas... tons of them. So many that I've got quite a backlog of things to work on. But nobody cares anymore. There's no demand, no deadline, no sense of urgency or responsibility. If I write, fine, but if not people rarely ask about it, and if they do it's more out of politeness than an attempt to guilt me into showing them something. So I don't write. Or I get lazy... instead of actually writing a scene I jot down a skeleton of what should happen in it. "I'll get back to that later," I tell myself, then never do. So I've been inventing projects to try to get that sense of urgency back. The "13 Days of Halloween" was somewhat of a success in this regard. Of the 13 stories, only about 5 of them were pre-written. Most of the time I was clacking hurriedly away the night before or morning of to try to get them posted on time. Not all of them are winners, and if I'd had them done ahead of time I might have changed the order a bit, but the point was I got them done. Some of these stories that have been wandering around at the back of my brain got recorded on the page. Some of them even spawned other forms of expression: a song, a poem, etc.

That project lasted about 2 weeks. But 52 weeks? That's something else entirely.

I think I convinced myself at the beginning that it would be like "13 Days" all year long. That the creation would always be a joy, a little dash of color added to my day. But some days, especially this past week or so, that hasn't been the case. It's been tough. I get home after a long day and realize, "Oh. I can't go to bed yet. I have to create something." Sometimes that involves sitting down with a blank piece of paper and ending up with something surprisingly delightful. But many times what actually happens is that I sit down and create junk. Like Day 40... I wrote one of the crappier poems I've ever written. I'm going to post it because it's what I created, but I don't have to be proud of it. Or Day 41 when I made a short blog post on my other blog and decided that would have to count as my Good Madness because I was too exhausted to do anything else.

So sometimes creation is fun and exciting and glamorous, but sometimes it's annoying, sometimes it's a chore, and sometimes what comes out of it is pitiful, a cop-out, or downright horrible. Still, I think creativity is something worth fighting for. It may have been tough this week, but there are several more to come. Hopefully the remaining 319 days will be a bit brighter.

Days Thirty-Nine to Forty-Six: Quality Not Guaranteed

Day 39: We went over concrete poems with an after school group at the library today. I made this butterfly as an example:



Day 40: I wrote one of the stupidest poems I've written in my life, which is saying something. But since everyone's pride needs a little pounding once in a while, I'll go ahead and post it:

The night you left you broke a piece off of your soul
and tucked it in my pocket. It's like you knew
your ghost would haunt my memory anyway
and you just wanted to help things along.

Well, I took that piece of you
and I ground it under my shoe.
I cut it into pieces and smashed it flat.
I burned it into ashes, but the smoke that rose
just hovered in the air, and did not dissipate.
You will not leave me, even once you're gone.

But what you don't know, what you can't have figured out yet
is what I gave to you on that very same night.
I wrote a curse upon your shadow, letters silvery and small
and hard to really catch sight of in dimness.
But it's there, a breath away from you for the rest of your days:
You'll never again know a love as true as this.

Day 41: I wrote a post over on my other blog and counted that as my good madness. Check it out HERE.

Day 42: While at my cleaning job I occasionally fill the quiet of working in an empty building by singing. This can be embarrassing when it turns out the building isn't actually empty, but fortunately that wasn't the case here. I came up with a song, but I haven't had the chance to record it properly yet:

This is the part of the story when everything seems black
Like there’s nothing left to hope for, and no way to turn back
This is the part where you know in your heart that you’re never going to win
This is the point where no one would blame you if you just gave in

This is the part of the story where things are just as bad as they seem
When you pinch yourself, desperately hoping you’ll wake from a terrible dream
This is the part where you know in your heart that your deepest fears have arrived
That nothing you’ve fought for has made it through, and no one you love has survived.

But I’m tired of living my life like it’s somebody else’s plaything
I want to fight back. I want to stand up. I want to shout and sing.
So maybe I’m not going to make it
That’s something I’ll just have to see
But for now I refuse to accept that it’s over.
You haven’t seen the last of me.

There are plenty of tales where the good guys prevail and evil’s wiped out in the end
But all of those stories, while lovely, are incomplete.
Because what they don’t tell you, what nobody tells you, is that it could have gone the other way.
No one’s “happily ever after” is guaranteed.

Which is why in that part of the story where the world seems most grim and bleak,
When you’re struggling to find one shred of hope, when you’re weary and heartsick and weak
It’s at this very part that you must trust your heart, that bit deep inside that says “fight.”
It may all end very badly, but it might just be alright…

I’m tired of living my life by someone else’s rules.
I want to fight back. I want to stand up. To show them that I am no fool.
So maybe I’m not going to make it
That’s something I’ll just have to see
But for now I refuse to accept that it’s over.
You haven’t seen the last of me.

So what does the next chapter hold, I wonder?
I hope I’m around to see.
But for now I refuse to accept that it’s over.
You haven’t seen the last of me.

Day 43: Continuing on the song theme, I wrote a wizard rock song called "Under the Stairs." Again, I don't have a recording yet but here are the lyrics:

Their words are sticks,
the lies are stones
You wish they’d leave you
well enough alone
You’ve learned to take it, but
you can’t help thinking
“When’s it going to stop?”
You tell the spiders in your cupboard
that you do not care—
but I know better
‘cause I’ve been there

Under the stairs
Trampled underfoot
Neglected and forgotten
Feeling rotten
and like nothing good could ever happen
But Harry don’t despair
For change is in the air
A correspondence on its way to you, addressed
“Under the Stairs.”

Your Uncle Dursley
seems in such an awful hurry
to get you and his whole family out
so you can’t find out what it’s all about
Those crazy owls dropping
letters by the dozens at your door
All say “To Harry”
Kinda scary
You’re not hidden anymore

Under the stairs
Trampled underfoot
Neglected and forgotten
Feeling rotten
And like nothing good could ever happen
But Harry—all that’s changed,
Someone out there knows your name
They knew somehow that you were waiting there
under the stairs

Counting down the seconds til another birthday
You have no idea how much is about to change
“Harry, yer a wizard,” is what the stranger says
But what it sounds like when it hits your ears
is “You’re finally going to make it out of here…”

Under the stairs
You don’t have to hide away
I see you grinning,
Head is spinning
Your adventures are all just beginning
It won’t be easy
But it’s worth it—you will see
Magic awaits you if you dare
To come out from under there
You will never again have to dwell
under the stairs.

Day 44: Today I brought out my cheap dollar-store watercolors and painted a few outfits for a paper doll.



The Fairy Princess Dress



The Red Riding Hood Look



Weird Pink and Purple Dress, and my favorite...



The Ballerina.

Day 45: In May, we'll be having young adult author (and Charlotte resident) Carrie Ryan come to speak at our library branch. If you're unfamiliar, she writes books with a unique take on the whole zombie apocalypse genre. I really enjoyed her first two books, The Forest of Hands and Teeth and The Dead-Tossed Waves, and her third in the series is due out in March. You can check out her website HERE for more info. Anyway, in order to get people excited for her visit my branch manager wanted to do a presentation about her for the Teen Advisory Board, a group of teens who meet monthly to discuss what kind of events they'd like for us to have at the library. But as a part of this presentation she wanted to have something she could give them with information about Carrie and a brief synopsis of each book. So for today's Good Madness I threw together a quick bookmark. Unfortunately I didn't have the foresight to print one out for myself, and since it's a Microsoft Publisher file it won't work on my computer at home. So you'll just have to trust me on this one.

Day 46: In yet another library-related project I've had to cut three-inch squares out of a variety of colors of paper for an event my coworker Kim is in charge of later this week. The problem with cutting 3 inch squares out of 8.5 by 11 inch paper is that it leaves an "L" shape of leftover paper for every six squares you cut. I didn't want to let that go to waste, so I made it into a chain counting down the days (147 right now) until LeakyCon, the Harry Potter conference I'll be going to in July. I used red, yellow, green, and blue to represent Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Slytherin, and Ravenclaw, respectively, and added purple for Sundays. Unfortunately I didn't realize quite how long it would be by the time I finished, so it's taken over my room a bit:



Above is where the chain ends by my bedroom door. This is the end I'll be removing links from as I count down. But it snakes up from there and over the window...



...before finally ending at the picture frame on the other side of the room. That's a lot of time! Hopefully I won't get sick of it before then.

There's plenty more madness to be had in the days ahead. Hopefully next time I'll have some more inspired things to share!

Days Thirty-Two to Thirty-Eight: What Is It?

Day 32: I was having an off day and tried to paint what I felt, which is always an interesting experiment. In this case in ended in the question you see in the post title: what exactly is it? At first it was all dark blues and blacks with a dash of glitter, and a weird shape that could perhaps be a mountain, or perhaps a hat. But then I started feeling a little better and wanted to brighten things up a bit so I added the yellow. Art is weird.



Day 33: At the library our summer programming has an international theme, and they've asked me to plan some events for teens as well as kids. I'll be doing one on a kind of Japanese ink art called sumi-e. The event isn't until August, but they needed the budgets to buy supplies last week so I had to plan it out anyway. In order to figure out what I needed, I tested out a few different kinds of ink and paper. Below are my favorites of several quick things I threw together for this purpose. Do you sense a theme?





Day 34: I worked more on my house-between-the-worlds story. I don't want to give anything away, so I tried to blur out the words but still show you a picture to give you proof that I did indeed write something:



Day 35: A friend/wizard rock musician I enjoy seeing every time they tour in North Carolina is sick and unable to come on tour this week (which means I won't be seeing him tonight when I drive up to Asheville for the show). I made this sign to cheer him up and wish him a speedy recovery.



Day 36: I've often heard it said that it's a good thing to "color outside the lines." The expression, of course, referring to coloring books and purposefully coloring outside the picture that's been drawn for you. I thought about it, though, and wondered if anyone had ever drawn a picture where it wouldn't really make sense UNLESS you colored outside the lines. I didn't have time to make a whole coloring book of them, but here's one, pre-color:



Day 37: I got a coupon from Target for a free 8x8 photo book from shutterfly. My good madness for today involved collecting old pictures (and taking some new ones), adding text, and formatting the book. I'll show the finished product when it gets here in the mail!

The coupon:



Day 38: More house-between-the-worlds. I hate to keep doing this, but it's a long-term project so it may pop up a lot between now and December. I'll try not to count it as my good madness every day, though.



Day 39: It hasn't really been too dreary here in NC, but when I heard a weather report that it's supposed to snow here on Thursday I got a little down in the dumps. That, combined with just having reread a book of A.A. Milne's poetry, produced the following poem. I'm oh-so-ready for spring!

That Time of The Year


It’s that time of the year when the rain comes down,
The time of the year for rain.
The sky unfurls like an ugly grey sweater
Joints ache and wheeze with the pain.

It’s that time of the year when my skin fits too tight
And my thoughts circle round the drain.
It’s the time of the year for cold and drear,
The time of the year for rain.

It’s that time of the year that’s hardest yet,
The time of the year that’s the worst:
When spring is so close and you feel it so much
You know that you’re going to burst.

It’s that time of the year when the rain comes down,
Or frost or sleet or snow.
Or maybe it’s nothing at all coming down,
Just that solemn drab stillness all around
And a promise of change coming in on the breeze,
With its hints of sunshine, that “not quite yet” tease.
Enough of it! Really!
Don’t mean to complain,
But I’m sick to death of the rain.