“Love is, in fact, an intensification of life, a completeness, a fullness, a wholeness of life.” – Thomas Merton
Morning Open Thread is a daily, copyrighted post from a host of editors and guest writers. We support our community, invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue in an open forum.
I’ve come to think of this post as one where you come for the music and stay for the conversation—so feel free to drop a note. The diarist gets to sleep in if she so desires and can show up long after the post is published. So you know, it's a feature, not a bug.
Join us, please.
Good morning everyone and welcome to Friday’s Morning Open Thread—which, if you’re reading this, means you’ve made it through another week. There is a bit of a tropical storm named Ida that is passing the Cayman Islands about now and headed toward the Gulf Coast. At current rates of speed (and if it follows the predicted path), Ida should arrive on the Louisiana coast sometime late Sunday in the guise of a Category 3 Hurricane.
In any event, I have no time to think this morning so have decided to write out a quick draft of something I’ve been entertaining myself with over the last few days that came up during my nightly call with my love. It is offered in the spirit of fun and foolishness; and I hope you enjoy.
Special Collections
You don’t need to have much of an imagination to figure out I’m an odd individual, a person that sees the world through squinted eyes while distracted by a brain that fires without the benefit of timing. My love—someone who knows me, perhaps, too well—called last night to tell me about her day and, asking about mine, I went off on a tangent about my classifications of people as books.
“That makes no sense. None at all,” she said.
“Yeah, well, I know. But it does. Sort of. To me.”
“Oh, so what am I?”
“A journal,” I said.
“What the fuck,” she said. “Seriously, I’m like a blank book. A work in progress?”
Well, okay. So I had (as usual) backed myself into a corner without a weapon or route of escape with the the lights cut at the breaker panel and the air conditioning turned off. Or at least that’s how it felt at the time. I took some time to explain why a journal as opposed to a book of songs or a biography, but I’m not sure I was entirely convincing.
Thing is, I do fall into those revelries and have to spend an inordinate amount of time analyzing, classifying, ordering, and reordering. I sift through my friends and family and those of you on line I’ve come to know a bit, trying to pigeonhole each one. Unfair, certainly, and an exercise done with a touch a folly and a copious number of uneducated guesses, but one I couldn’t let go. As she and I continued to catch up on our days, I opened a random post of mine from a few weeks ago and traced the list as we spoke.
Brecht, for instance, is an unfinished novel destined to redefine the genre of Americana and surely to be short-listed for an American Book Award. Ice Blue a work of science written by a humanist, fit for a master’s class at MIT. Stude Dude is (of course) a cutting edge graphic sci-fi trilogy. Nolana (more difficult to grasp in a single volume) is a hand-crafted, rare art book—one which is highly valued but never comes to market as its owners consider it too dear. Dijit is a special reissue of Revenge of the Lawn with an introduction by Hunter Thompson and printed on recycled paper with accompanying notes and references by Jack Kerouac. CaptBLI was difficult (I’ll say that out loud). Sort of a collection of pamphlets in an over-large binder stained with oil and yesterday’s breakfast, filled with an assortment of entertaining leaflets in strains of how-to-get-things-done and what-to-do when such and such happens that one consults more often than the Farmer’s Almanac.
But at this point in the conversation, as my love corrected me on the spelling of the plural of encyclopedia, I asked her what book I might be~in her eyes.
After a few moments of silence, she responded. “A mystery.”
I laughed but was secretly disappointed. Am I that obvious, that transparent? Perhaps, I thought. I’ll have to give her that one.
But I kept on with my categorization. Mr. Scribe, I though, is a worn, leather-bound tome, a biography of a man in full by the likes of David McCullough. Socks? A book by an enigmatic mystic viewed as a bible by some and, along with prognostications of some fame, containing long passages in a language yet to be deciphered despite efforts by trained cytologists and peppered with sketches and old rock and roll memorabilia. To me, Sandbear75 is a cookbook this morning—one filled with stories about the histories of each recipe and the one you keep cleaned and in that place of honor on the shelf: to be pulled when a special meal (one of dear friends or a particular woman you want to impress) is needed. Funningforrest, let me see—perhaps the well-worn Audubon guide to the birds of the world or a thin, philosophical volume of letters to a son from a father.
While I only half listened to my love’s recitation of her schedule for October (she invited me to an art opening in Baltimore at the end of that month that I will most definitely try to make), I went through most of my sisters (romance, pulp fiction, a Miss Manners sort of series, and a dictionary of methods of cleaning stains off various surfaces).
But then back to the list of commenting authors on that post: some are easier for me than others, I learned. For instance, exlrrp is an autobiography disguised as a history of the times themselves, full of blunt talk and politically-incorrect passages about wanking in exotic places all around the world; while Officebss is an entire set of beloved encyclopediae that have been passed down (through the maternal line) for generations. A small-press printing of poems would be Hayseed, one that the frontispiece notes has been translated into 19 languages.
The more complicated ones, like Cawfeemug and Edward Song, are difficult because they hide deep in the stacks. The former is like a forgotten book patiently waiting to be discovered by that one particular, precocious child that will pull it at random, devour it, and be changed for life; the latter a slim volume of personal essays destined to touch only those few that find its staid cover inviting enough to open. Bearsguy, for example, might be a self-help book, but one that isn’t in that section of the second-hand bookstore but in the sports shelves between the statistical based collections and personal tales of someone who spent a season visiting every pro football stadium.
Going down the list, there are those less focused in my mind, like wandering down the shelves with my fingertips kissing the bindings and my eyes unfocused. Like LamontCranston, a swashbuckling adventure tale with long passages underpinned with spiritual revelation, a song of redemption disguised as a travelogue; Randallt, one of a series of a little-known river called something like the French Broad that, upon reading one finds is not at all just a book about a river. Crashing Vor and CV’sGirlFriend are—at least at this early moment in the day—a series of books with colorful spins, each on a single subject of the various arts from pottery to music production, jealously guarded by anyone who possesses the entire set. Treehugger is a finely-crafted short story about life on a pond at the edge of a wood and Justmypiece that cherished book of fairy tales that recalls your best childhood memories.
And then there is RiverRover. For him, I haven’t yet found a classification.
We spoke—my love and I—well into the night and past my bedtime (which we are apt to do) but I gladly sacrificed sleep as I pondered the nature of journals. They are filled with private musings, past exploits and records of failures, of spontaneous reactions and sad recallings, rich with honesty and personal growth, and (just as importantly) pages still to be filled and tales not yet told.
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Be well, be kind, and appreciate the love you have in your life.
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From Charlie is our darling: A tribute by Dennis Hartley (on Digby’s Hullabaloo):
Stalwart to the end, Charlie Watts was the “rock” in rock ‘n’ roll. Solid, reliable, resolute. He sat Sphinx-like behind his kit for over 50 years, laying down a steady beat while remaining seemingly impassive to all the madness and mayhem that came with the job of being a Rolling Stone. He was cool as a cucumber, as impeccably tailored and enigmatic as Reynolds Woodcock. “Reynolds Who?”
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Grab your coffee or tea and join us, please.
What's on your mind this morning?
