Special Sunday Lazy Man Edition

Let's say that somewhere, the a.m. went missing. Since that time I've failed at figuring out how to get the water on my head, which is easier on any normal day. Youths spend hours using stiff hair product to produce such a surfeit of chaos as you see atop of my head. My lazy breakfast was well-rounded (think of circles) and I coundn't focus to read the newspaper. Not even the sports page!

I have an itch to write this morning. Well, this afternoon now after my non-existent Sunday morning. I've already become more active - I've sneezed three times! I took my laundry (already folded) from the basket and moved it nearer to its home. I cleared off the dining room table in case dining needs to break out.

About this itch to write. That's what I see as a good sign. Here it is, Sunday, the normal day of blogging rest and I'm thinking about writing and here come the words too! I've started the cheery, highly-praised book about Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch. I'm just fifty pages in and I'm already convinced that this is going to be the most important things I've read in years. He tosses off observations like this one about power in Rwandan history:

"Like all of history, it is a record of successive struggles for power, and to a very large extent power consists in the ability to make others inhabit your story of their reality- even, as is so often the case, then that story is written in their blood."

The book is a good kind of slippery. He ranges anywhere he sees connection, from Plato to Ralph Ellison. After reading his witness about the stories of the survivors on both sides, I know that I'd want him to tell my story. What better praise can you get than that?

NPR featured Karen Russell's collection St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves: Stories which is getting a lot of attention. After listening to her talk about infusing the everyday with the impossible and making it normal, I'm convinced that she's something special. This might not be the best foundation for a writing career. With any luck, she'll tropes into new territories rather than suffer the fate of the M. Night Shamalans of this world. Sorry M, I'm not much into calling people out here but I do hope that you find a way back from your own self-mythology.

You see, I am spending time with the words of others and my own too. I'll probably spend time painting as well as writing a bit more. Days like this I can imagine a large pile of papers with a large number of words on them, written by me! My imagination about me as a writer is still immature, still a bit magical. My writing imagination is developing along with practice, and that's a brand new thing.

I am growing to like the process of digging in and seeing what happens on the page. It's not quite an itch. But as you know, I'm at war with comparisons and it is a lazy Sunday, so whatever I'm up to, it's just getting called an itch until other symptoms appear.