Facebook
in it’s infinite wisdom recently pasted one of those “See Your
Memories”
posts on my feed, where they dig out one of
your
posts from ten or twelve years ago and thrust
it front of you with no regard to the emotional or psychological
consequences. I ignore most of them, but this one was about when our
cat Yoshi (now deceased) got stuck in a tree, and
it was a funny memory so I re-posted it.
I have no idea why Yoshi decided to climb up a tree that day, as he
had
expressed no previous interest in trees whatsoever. But climb he did,
and when he realized he was stuck, he yowled like a banshee from hell
and upset the entire neighborhood. That was quite an afternoon. We
finally gave up on trying to get him out of
the
tree and decided he could either figure it out himself or just live
the rest of his days out up there. Sure enough, he did manage to get
himself down, then
came
to the door and stalked into the house, silent
and dignified, as though nothing at
all
had happened and he hadn’t spent the last three hours crying like a
little bitch. I love cats and I miss having them. But
alas,
my heart has been shattered too many times and I cannot love again.
The
poem that I was somewhat more satisfied with last week underwent
another procedure this weekend, and is again transformed. It’s
interesting what time and distance will do in providing solutions to
tricky poems. One of my co-workers recently ask me how my poetry was
going, as she knows I have a reading coming up soon, and
I told her that it was going okay, but that writing poems isn’t the
sort of thing that you can do effectively on a strict production
schedule. I’m finally starting to accept that poems evolve, ever so
slowly and in their own time, and pushing the process is almost never
effective. Part of the strain for me is this entirely self-created
pressure to ensure that I have something “new” to read, because I
feel like such a failure for not have written much poetry over the
last few years. But
I
am trying to let go and trust in the poems to reveal what they need
to bloom.
At
my last session, my
trainer
told me that
I had finally
locked in good form after
months of practice, and therefore I
didn’t
have to be quite as measured during
my sets
and that I should start
“puttin’
some
stank on it.” I
didn’t ask for clarification because
I’m proud
and
there was no way I was going to stand there soaked
in sweat
and
tell some youth with two percent body fat that I’m
too old
to
understand his street lingo. I
nodded knowingly and
gleaned
internally
that
the
general gist of
that phrase
meant
that
I
should “go faster” and “be more aggressive” during
my sets. Upon
looking
up
the phrase up in the Urban Dictionary when I got home,
I was heartened to discover that I wasn’t far off:
Put
some stank on it: (phrase), (sl)- Phrase meaning to add a
personal flare or special ability to any given task or action. As in
throwing an especially fast fast-ball, or making a difficult
billiards shot. This can be applied to almost anything where talent
is a factor in achieving the desired result:“I've never seen such a
shot pulled off under those conditions! He really put some stank on
it that time!”
So,
now I am puttin’ some stank on it. Gettin’ my swagger on. Trying
to be "explosive” or at least go a little faster, I guess. I
don’t enjoy this. I liked my measured, slow-pokey sets and now I
sweat a lot and feel like a bit of a maniac. That’s the problem
with progress. It just causes entropy.
While
I am enduring a cat-free existence, I can at least live vicariously
through Simon’s Cat videos:
--Kristen McHenry
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