"Any murder at all, of any sort, is a murder of hope, too."

It's fascinating what blood can do.

It pumps through us all and keeps our bodies well-oiled, as if we really are machines that require constant lubrication, and it is necessary to survive. In our self-sufficient factories (in all but fuel, anyway), we reproduce the blood that has died, and the cycle continues until the factory shuts down.

There are different kinds of blood at our bodies' disposal. White blood cells provide a natural defense against outsiders, a resistance that maintains order within the machine. They're responsible for seeking and destroying that which can harm us, and unless we have some kind of deficiency or malfunction, they are what we rely upon to ensure the cycle continues.

Red blood cells carry oxygen to and from the heart, pumping the essence of our lives throughout the machine. We breathe, but red blood is what makes our breath worthwhile.

It can also tell us when something is wrong. Blood is innately pure-- it's hard to infect something that is self-maintained, after all, especially if the infection has an opportunity to die when the short-lived blood cells die themselves.

Every now and then, though, something resists the cycle. It sits within our bloodstream, within our mechanical columns made out of arteries, veins and capillaries, and sets up its own defense.

It initializes a war that, try as they might, our white blood cells, our mercenaries, cannot defend against because it isn't a threat. Not to the blood, anyway. Our blood doesn't know to warn us that something wicked this way comes, so I can't hate it. I can just acknowledge that its trying to do its best, even if it sometimes has something terrible to report, because it is still performing well according to its primary directives. Wake up. Move out. Forge ahead. Die. Repeat.

It's not as toxic as outright poison, what sits in it, and it's entirely innocent. It makes sense that it would flow into the bloodstream, joining with what it knows. Maybe it was bored, this hub, and simply wanted to explore the rest of the battlefield. Slowly but surely, it's preparing to destabilize its base, departing for somewhere else that's more exciting, but it will never really know how devastating that tactical move will be for the war.

How will the blood know where to go if half of base camp is suddenly missing? Where will the mission directives be issued? I hope mission control told the lieutenants what to do if the base shuts down because the enemy's approaching. Mercurial and plotting, it glides beneath our radars, opportunistic and vindictive. So, so vindictive.

What will we do if the enemy is death? I'm not ready, so I hope mission control knows what it's doing.

Today's assignment-

Today's assignment from the Muse is actually a tip. I'll post it below:

Notice from the Department of Procrastination Prevention

The top-performing item in my store of procrastination-prevention equipment is the humble egg timer. I use a cheap wind-up model--you can literally hear it through my studio door--but after a minute or so I fail to notice the ticking. Set the timer for anywhere from the minimum to the maximum, open your laptop or writing pad, and play a game of Beat the Clock. Whether you set a modest goal of one sentence or an ambitious goal of one thousand words, chances are you'll have something underway by he time the dinger goes off.



Monica Wood, the author of the Muse, is pretty neat. She's a published author of a fair few fictional works, and she keeps a decently laid out homepage for our perusal:

www.monicawood.com

Take a look! While you do that, I'm going to try and sleep away my head cold.

Silence. There was no more screaming or thunder.

Write about something on the verge of collapsing.

"Cast off!" cried to the captain. His tattered coat whipped about his torso, held together by a series of leather straps and fraying thread. The coat matched the rest of his Navy vestments, fraying and barely recognizable as belonging to a commanding officer.

The ship lurched against the waves that grew steadily stronger with the coming darkness, claiming the skies with their watery majesty in a feat of pure natural energy before falling atop the ship's deck, reminding the crew that the ocean cannot be mastered.

The captain chanced a glance at the sopping wet group of people huddled near the doors to the hull, too proud to leave the deck yet too frightened to detach from the railings. 'They used to represent so much power,' he thought.

Another tidal wave battered the ship's already tenuous structure, forcing the crew and passengers to duck low or risk being thrown overboard. Muted shouting from the crew, drowned out by the deafening cacophony of the weather's superior screaming, never reached the captain's ears. He saw them crying out for help, but he realized, with a finality that he thought the fatally wounded must feel, that it wouldn't matter if he could hear them; no one was surviving this storm.

Prime Ministers, Presidents, Kings and Queens... the world's finest leaders assembled on the captain's ship, hoping against the terrible odds that he could deliver them safely to the island. Each nation sent their last hopes, the people in whom they have placed their faith, to the captain with the understanding that, if humanity was to survive, it would be because he delivered these fierce individuals to the Land of Resurrection. As lightening, red and jagged, pierced the sky in violent arcs, the terror that stole the ferocity from their eyes proved to the captain that they aren't any better than the billions of people they left behind to die in the fires and earthquakes.

All at once, the ship rose into the air, carried by what romantics would call Poseidon's mighty fist, and fell.

Silence. There was no more screaming or thunder. The captain looked once to his right and then to his left as the ship fell, seemingly in slow motion, toward the water's surface. He looked at the leaders, weak and fragile, holding each other despite the wars they waged that brought about this apocalypse. If he had the time before the ship broke the surface, he would have spit at them.

The water engulfed the ship like a great maw. It was as if the kraken had been called to finish the job, to quell the fury of the Gods by ending the miserable lives of the people who angered them.

'The world is over now,' thought the captain as gallons of water filled his lungs.

Before his last thoughts were corrupted by the murky darkness, the captain saw the sky split wide open in a flash of heavenly light. He could feel the storms stop raging and the earth stop trembling, and he closed his eyes with a smile on his lips.

I don't believe in absolutes, but the only constant is change.

A good friend and fellow writer bought me The Pocket Muse 2, by Monica Wood, for my birthday. Each page is dedicated to something a writer can use to shake up, inspire or alter entirely his or her writing. Thus, I've decided to rededicate my blog to following the Muse daily, completing each assignment from cover-to-cover. I'll probably sneak in an update on my life now and then, but at least this way, I'll likely do it with more of my old (or new!) writing flair.

Without further ado...

Open an imaginary door. What do you see?

The door creaks open with a slow, repulsive resistance that sounds like all the horror movie expositions. You know the sound-- it's when the stupid heroine follows the bloody trail into a dark alleyway that leads to a single black door, forcing her to either turn back now and save herself or to keep forging ahead because her also-stupid boyfriend ran headlong into the fray in a burst of sheer masculinity (as if we didn't know he was tough already).

This door is different, however. If the heroine were to step inside, she wouldn't be assaulted by her newly-transformed lover. She'd see a world lit by blackened, wrought-iron sconces instead of street lights. She'd see a cobble-stoned path lined with neatly-trimmed shrubberies and inviting wooden benches spotted with smiling men and women and children, all wearing nice 18th century clothing.

She would realize that the door wasn't creaking with the Hollywood scare-tactic screeching that usually means imminent death or a long, suspenseful jogging sequence. It was creaking because the hinges were aged and our popular door greases don't exist in this world.

If she walked further down the path, she would smell the heavy scents of truly rural America -- long grasses, Evergreens, dust in the air -- but with something more. Instead of cologne and expensive perfumes emanating from the people-lined benches, the heroine would smell their joys and sorrows. Each person would share his or her life through the woman's olfactory senses, allowing her to interpret every nuance in its purest form.

One woman's essence would imprint a story of anguish on the heroine. Her husband, though sitting next to her, is planning to leave her to spare their family from his alcoholism.

A few benches down, another man's musky pheremones would send the heroine reeling from all the sins of the flesh that he had committed just one year ago, despite having just purchased a ring for his betrothed.

The bench people's presence would continue to infiltrate the heroine's scent recognition, allowing her to be made aware of their most private secrets, uninterrupted by sound or sight. Their rhetoric would still be masked by their immobility and their stoic uniformity, removing the heroine from that which makes us innately human-- having to interpret the world with the clogging-up of another human's influence.

If the heroine continued along the path, the benches she passed would inevitably become devoid of the statuesque chemical storybooks. She would be alone to process the information she had gathered from all of those perfect strangers, turning the cruelties and the pleasures around and around in her head, letting them mesh together to form a a conclusion that, in this world, the boundaries of pleasure and pain are married and that she alone could avoid becoming another frozen heartache or paralyzed gleeful romantic if she just kept walking, protecting her secret.

And then the door would slam shut behind her with a terrible clang. If she turned to run, she would know that the smell of those people would start to overrun her thoughts again, threatening to dismantle her carefully-constructed defense against this world.

Careful to control her emotions, she will instead walk forever along the cobble-stoned path, disallowing herself to sit and rest lest she become one of the sad majority, locked inside herself in a world that collects the self-absorbed.


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Tell me what you think!

Sometimes, it's OK to reset

I'm a Unitarian Universalist in my spare time.

Growing up Roman Catholic, I retained so much of my built-in guilt the church heaped upon us woe-begotten Christians, and when I think about how I never go to the UU church, I can't help but feel twangs of that same guilt. They assure me that there is no guilt within the sanctuary, and I smile blankly in thanks.

Alleviating that guilt commands that I do something in recompense. Not because I want to purify the cold, rotting feeling that guilt creates, but because, after almost every service, I am already compelled by the sermon to leap into social action. If I can somehow be part of the support system that keeps the UU banner waving, I will feel better about the years of neglect I unwittingly caused my new haven, and my Christian heart will stop quivering with anxiety.

Is it really guilt, though? I've noticed something about myself that never ceases to amaze me. So much so, in fact, that I'm surprised I haven't written about it yet.

I am a people-pleaser.

My peers (and by peers, lately I mean the SUNY Potsdam faculty and administration) repeat ad nauseum that I'm a leader, born and bred, and that my vigor comes from a good, sturdy ability to see a need and fill it. While that's all well and good, I would like to add more to that definition, with my own spin on the topic of "leadership" and how it applies to my life.

I am a people-pleaser.

I don't actually know if I'm ever really leading. I know that a certain amount of things must be done within the paper to get it out every week, so that's simple math. We all have the appropriate limbs and know-how to make the computers do what we'd like them to, so it's less so leadership and moreso appropriate guidance. As far as production is concerned, anyway.

The other stuff... the pens I bought through the paper, the constant praising emails, the office hours, the bright smiles when I see a writer or an editor in passing, the excessive, private emails of concern when I notice that someone isn't having a good day... that I cry when things aren't going well for an editor and that it hurts when an editor, whose skills I've cultivated, cuts me down are just par for the course.

I'm not really a leader any more than you. When I go to the UU church and feel that call to action, it's because I'm filled with a sense of dutiful caring that forces me to react lest I be one of the uncaring few.

I care, more than I should, but so did the boy in the sermon I just read that inspired this posting:

A boy was walking along the shoreline of an ocean after high tide, picking up and throwing beached fauna back into the water. A man who was observing this was puzzled and asked the boy how it mattered-- millions of them are washed ashore every day in various parts of the world. The boy picked up another fish, and throw...ing it back into the ocean, he said, "It mattered to that fish."

-Taken from my Facebook status.

I hope that we're all able to be like that boy someday. I don't think I would call him a leader, either, but I'd certainly call him a friend. A brother. A care-giver, a doctor. Maybe a philanthropist, or a social worker. When he grows up, of course, but then...

... how many of us still need to grow up? Not in the pejorative, "you need to grow up! nyah!" kind of grow up, but the kind of growing up that only true introspection can achieve.

Just think of how many fish that boy could have saved if the man helped, for instance.