Sunday, November 24, 2019

Poem-Induced Head-Banging, Crocodile Wars, Clothes Complaint

This weekend, I find myself banging my head against the wall over these new poems I’m working on. With both of them, I think I’m trying to do too many things in too small of a space, and I’m getting all tangled and twisted up in confusing metaphors involving fire and churning waters and clarity of mind and the Trapezius. (That’s the big triangular muscle in your upper back, in case you didn’t know.) Also, Glut Bridges, although that’s a separate poem and will be a bit more...cheeky. Ha! (If I can’t write a proper poem I can at least crack myself up with a terrible pun.) I know it will all come together, but I’m very frustrated at the moment. It’s all in there, I can feel it, but it won’t come out right. Argh! I need a writers-frustration helmet to keep me from bruising my forehead.

I’m also frustrated about the crocodiles. Of late, I have been playing lots of vintage Tomb Raider while waiting with baited breath for the award-winning Divinity: Original Sin 2 to go on sale...and it finally did! I downloaded it with great excitement, only to find that’s it just as hair-pulling as trying to write poems. This is directly related to the crocodiles. You see, because one bad apple summoned a demon, an authoritarian government rounded up all of us sorcerers and stuck us on a prison island and put sorcery-inhibiting collars on us so we can’t sorcer-er properly. But this one guy, we’ll call him Not-at-All-Shady Ed, claims that he knows of a special artifact that he can use to teleport us off the island. Only there’s a catch: It’s hidden on a crocodile-infested dune. So I was all like, pfhht, crocodiles, who cares, I can take down some crocs, no problemo. And I marched off to said dune and proceeded to get my ass handed to me repeatedly. These crocodiles are mean and they are equipped. They set me on fire, chomped me in half, and may have possibly electrocuted me. And my super-special spell barely puts a dent in them. This is one of those times when I remember why I got married. I poured out my crocodile woes to Mr. Typist, and he has promised to watch the next battle with an eagle eye and give me pointers. So maybe at least one thing will go right this week.

I know that complaining about clothing shops has become a cliché on this blog, but I must once again gripe about the appalling state of retail in this country. Mr. Typist and I headed off to Ubiquitous Big Box Store recently to replace a glass light dome that alarmingly fell and shattered into pieces in the dead of night in our kitchen. Since we were already going there, I announced my intent to buy A Few Items to Freshen Up My Wardrobe—because apparently, I am a fool who never learns. The selection was a disgusting, utterly uninspiring collection of the boring, flouncy, dull, frumpy and totally unimaginative. I couldn’t bring myself to purchase a single thing, despite my daily despair when I open my closet and stare at the same fifteen to twenty items I’ve worn repeatedly for the last nine years. I think some of my issue is that due to my childhood, I feel extremely self-conscious about wearing the same clothes too many times. My mom reads this blog sometimes and I don’t want her to feel bad about this (Hi, Mom! Don’t feel bad!), but there were five children and obviously as a result not a lot of money to spend on flashy designer wardrobes. And kids are total jerks and savages, so I got made fun of and bullied constantly for wearing the same things over and over again. But my personal childhood shame nonetheless does not excuse retailers from doing their due diligence in at least providing something wearable to their customer base. Even Mr. Typist gave up in frustration—as I was looking for clothes, he was desperately trying to track down an employee who could tell him where to find a light cover. He finally gave up and cited his quite accurate analysis of the issue: As more people shop online, there are fewer resources to hire people in retail shops, so fewer customers go to retail shops, because there is less and less help available for them to find things like light domes. So true. 
 
Since this has been kind of a gloomy post, here is Chris Isaak’s rendition of Blue Hotel. Enjoy!

--Kristen McHenry