Word Shepherd http://wordshepherd.com Editor and writer, stalwart and fink. Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:00:16 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 wordshepherdhttp://feedburner.google.com Grist http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wordshepherd/~3/ndfjiYWB-Ok/ http://wordshepherd.com/2012/01/grist/#comments Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:00:16 +0000 David Mahaffey http://wordshepherd.com/?p=1024 Mr. Jenkins hurtled with all possible speed toward a mostly nondescript but increasingly insufferable little blue dot tucked away in a forgotten corner of the cosmos and wondered, not for the first time, why the one immutable Law of the Universe had been written the way that it had. That Mr. Jenkins had been present for and indeed a part of its writing did not lessen his confoundment. Nor did his frustration abate when he was asked to shuck off his several quantum states and wedge himself unceremoniously into a form recognizable to the citizens of the blue planet, with all its binary nature and its wheezing bellows and its fluids. The thing couldn’t even hear spacesong.

He was unaccustomed to hurrying. He was in charge of a cycle so complex, so replete with interdependent machinations, that he deigned to carry a pocket watch to keep track. Mr. Jenkins knew how much time should be left, given when the latest cycle had begun, and he knew that somehow a good deal less time actually remained. The harvest had fallen, unfathomably, behind schedule. If such a thing were possible he’d have suggested that his instruments had malfunctioned. But his pocket watch was the most carefully calibrated tool in existence. It never ran fast, never needed winding. If the watch slowed, time simply slowed momentarily to accommodate the watch. Nobody minded the occasional extra moment to savor or fritter away. Now the watch had ticked ahead, and had done so dangerously close to the midnight hour.

It had never done so before, though it was clear enough what would happen if a new day dawned prematurely. Without the proper fuel, morning could not come. Mr. Jenkins required every available instant for the harvest, the last speck wending its way back from Earth at exactly the moment the pocket watch shuddered across the meridian into the new cycle. There could be no margin for error. So Mr. Jenkins hastened toward his flock on the blue planet, his crippled human form deaf to cosmic sounds and blind to any but the brightest of blacks. No wonder they called space a void, if this was all they could detect.

This close to the end of a cycle, Mr. Jenkins was always weak. He had, in fact, intended to sleep his way through the exhausting and sometimes painful seconds on either cusp of the next cycle, but like any creature of long habit, he’d been roused by the slight shift in the pattern, its attendant foreboding. His partner, perhaps also restless, was not abed when Mr. Jenkins woke. There wasn’t time to search. He’d remembered to leave a note, just in case.

He had not, however, remembered to wear any pants. He was groggy and had done well, frankly, to remember to don the human body. He’d find something in stride with the local fashion once he arrived. It was hard, anyway, to achieve historical accuracy from this distance. Reconnaissance data traveled at relativistic speeds. Mr. Jenkins could do the same, though it meant burning through nearly all of his reserves.

Nearer to Earth Mr. Jenkins slowed his approach. He had, for one thing, to dodge all the clutter surrounding the planet. He’d also noticed a second moon in orbit and was pretty sure it wasn’t supposed to be there. The final burst of energy necessary to adjust course toward the ashen moon emptied him, and his human form crashed unceremoniously into what seemed from above to be a mountain range.

It was a mountain, but of chalk and dust instead of rock. Mr. Jenkins was forcibly reminded of the inefficiency of his breathing apparatus and excavated himself at once from beneath the mound of debris, gasping for air. He made note of the poor nasal design for later. It proved difficult to get his bearings on a moon that ought not to have existed at all, but he trudged forth, keeping the Earth in front of him and trying to remember not to stare into the sun if he happened upon it. He did not manage very many steps and was prepared to attribute this to another failing of the human design when he realized he was starving. He would require an early sample of the harvest.

Coming toward him across the dunes was a hooded figure bearing a shepherd’s crook. Mr. Jenkins, hoping he hadn’t been seen, ducked behind a rocky outcrop that looked very much like a stack of human spines. He fell upon the shepherd and partook of the man’s soul. The husk crumpled to the ground. Mr. Jenkins relieved it of the hooded cloak and crook, then left the moon he now knew to call Grist, a mound of bones and fire, in search of his lost flock.

Every two weeks some friends and I create new posts on the same topic. This week’s synchroblog posts — about speed — are listed on our group blog, The Creative Collective. Please read them all.

]]> Mr. Jenkins hurtled with all possible speed toward a mostly nondescript but increasingly insufferable little blue dot tucked away in a forgotten corner of the cosmos and wondered, not for the first time, why the one immutable Law of the Universe had been written the way that it had. That Mr. Jenkins had been present for and indeed a part of its writing did not lessen his confoundment. Nor did his frustration abate when he was asked to shuck off his several quantum states and wedge himself unceremoniously into a form recognizable to the citizens of the blue planet, with all its binary nature and its wheezing bellows and its fluids. The thing couldn’t even hear spacesong.

He was unaccustomed to hurrying. He was in charge of a cycle so complex, so replete with interdependent machinations, that he deigned to carry a pocket watch to keep track. Mr. Jenkins knew how much time should be left, given when the latest cycle had begun, and he knew that somehow a good deal less time actually remained. The harvest had fallen, unfathomably, behind schedule. If such a thing were possible he’d have suggested that his instruments had malfunctioned. But his pocket watch was the most carefully calibrated tool in existence. It never ran fast, never needed winding. If the watch slowed, time simply slowed momentarily to accommodate the watch. Nobody minded the occasional extra moment to savor or fritter away. Now the watch had ticked ahead, and had done so dangerously close to the midnight hour.

It had never done so before, though it was clear enough what would happen if a new day dawned prematurely. Without the proper fuel, morning could not come. Mr. Jenkins required every available instant for the harvest, the last speck wending its way back from Earth at exactly the moment the pocket watch shuddered across the meridian into the new cycle. There could be no margin for error. So Mr. Jenkins hastened toward his flock on the blue planet, his crippled human form deaf to cosmic sounds and blind to any but the brightest of blacks. No wonder they called space a void, if this was all they could detect.

This close to the end of a cycle, Mr. Jenkins was always weak. He had, in fact, intended to sleep his way through the exhausting and sometimes painful seconds on either cusp of the next cycle, but like any creature of long habit, he’d been roused by the slight shift in the pattern, its attendant foreboding. His partner, perhaps also restless, was not abed when Mr. Jenkins woke. There wasn’t time to search. He’d remembered to leave a note, just in case.

He had not, however, remembered to wear any pants. He was groggy and had done well, frankly, to remember to don the human body. He’d find something in stride with the local fashion once he arrived. It was hard, anyway, to achieve historical accuracy from this distance. Reconnaissance data traveled at relativistic speeds. Mr. Jenkins could do the same, though it meant burning through nearly all of his reserves.

Nearer to Earth Mr. Jenkins slowed his approach. He had, for one thing, to dodge all the clutter surrounding the planet. He’d also noticed a second moon in orbit and was pretty sure it wasn’t supposed to be there. The final burst of energy necessary to adjust course toward the ashen moon emptied him, and his human form crashed unceremoniously into what seemed from above to be a mountain range.

It was a mountain, but of chalk and dust instead of rock. Mr. Jenkins was forcibly reminded of the inefficiency of his breathing apparatus and excavated himself at once from beneath the mound of debris, gasping for air. He made note of the poor nasal design for later. It proved difficult to get his bearings on a moon that ought not to have existed at all, but he trudged forth, keeping the Earth in front of him and trying to remember not to stare into the sun if he happened upon it. He did not manage very many steps and was prepared to attribute this to another failing of the human design when he realized he was starving. He would require an early sample of the harvest.

Coming toward him across the dunes was a hooded figure bearing a shepherd’s crook. Mr. Jenkins, hoping he hadn’t been seen, ducked behind a rocky outcrop that looked very much like a stack of human spines. He fell upon the shepherd and partook of the man’s soul. The husk crumpled to the ground. Mr. Jenkins relieved it of the hooded cloak and crook, then left the moon he now knew to call Grist, a mound of bones and fire, in search of his lost flock.

Every two weeks some friends and I create new posts on the same topic. This week’s synchroblog posts — about speed — are listed on our group blog, The Creative Collective. Please read them all.

]]> http://wordshepherd.com/2012/01/grist/feed/ 0 http://wordshepherd.com/2012/01/grist/ Borrowing Umbrellas http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wordshepherd/~3/mr6QCn903LI/ http://wordshepherd.com/2012/01/borrowing-umbrellas/#comments Tue, 10 Jan 2012 14:00:02 +0000 David Mahaffey http://wordshepherd.com/?p=1013 I used to write letters to myself on New Year’s Eve, to be opened a year and a day later. These exercises in introspection were frustrating, at best, full of halfhearted optimism that in the ensuing year I would somehow finally get my shit together and be the kind of person I wanted to be: stop playing so many video games; confess my love to my middle-school crush du jour; read fewer novels in math class; write more; have less stuff; be part of a community other than the tiny one I cultivated for myself. Every December would end in disappointment, knowing January would bring fresh testimony of my failure to be a decent human being. So one year I gave up in favor of drinking champagne and goofing off with good friends. It wasn’t a big deal. I was too exhausted for the annual retrospective and unwilling to unseal yet another autobiographical indictment. I released myself.

It is a trait common among my people — and I certainly share it — that no matter how much good we do, it never feels as though we’ve done enough. I am lucky at the moment to feel merely inadequate, merely lazy and hypocritical and complacent about my own contributions to the world, but I have known the crippling doubt, the desperate need to do more, that from time to time overburdens us all. We may be thoroughly inept at persuading ourselves that we’ve managed to eke out an existence that may not balance the scales but at least doesn’t tip them too far in the wrong direction, but we do a better job of persuading each other of this. I think we’re all pretty good at helping each other carry these failures; call it relentless kindness, radical forgiveness, grace, or simply the fatigue of knowing after endless search that there is nothing else to offer but ourselves.

In moments of self-judgment I crave those reassurances but at the same time I have an insatiable appetite for the judgment itself. It feels cleansing to acknowledge how far below my standards I fall. Having expectations doesn’t count unless I’m gritting my teeth and struggling to meet them. Who better to evaluate how I’m doing than the one who spends all the time inside my head? My people are well-meaning but not omniscient. I trust them because they refrain from platitudes and their sentiments are unvarnished, but what do they know about how fiercely or pathetically I have raged against the ills of the world? What does anyone else know about how well I’m living up to my potential? But then again, what do I?

Of course, once you introduce potential, the game is over. I am an incorrigible relativist, which means for me there is simultaneously always room for improvement and no hope of ever influencing the complex set of systems that govern our existence. Given either starting point, I can point the way to futility in alarmingly few moves. It doesn’t matter whether I’m meant to influence the system, guided by a divine hand or voices in my head or the flap of a mosquito’s wings in China. The system is the system either way, and we’re all standing under the same sky, eyeing the same dark cloud, and most of us never remember to bring an umbrella.

I’d say we should all give ourselves a break, but I know it doesn’t work that way. And sure, there’s something greater than the sum of our parts in the way people carry each other’s loads. Usually the only thing that keeps me from gorging on self-doubt is the energy it takes to huddle under a borrowed umbrella and patch the more egregious holes. The downpour drowns out all but the loudest truths. One of them is that the world is broken. Another is that it’s a gift to take care of each other. Next time it might be your turn to bring the umbrella.

Every two weeks some friends and I create new posts on the same topic. This week’s synchroblog posts — about hunger — are listed on our group blog, The Creative Collective. Please read them all.

]]> I used to write letters to myself on New Year’s Eve, to be opened a year and a day later. These exercises in introspection were frustrating, at best, full of halfhearted optimism that in the ensuing year I would somehow finally get my shit together and be the kind of person I wanted to be: stop playing so many video games; confess my love to my middle-school crush du jour; read fewer novels in math class; write more; have less stuff; be part of a community other than the tiny one I cultivated for myself. Every December would end in disappointment, knowing January would bring fresh testimony of my failure to be a decent human being. So one year I gave up in favor of drinking champagne and goofing off with good friends. It wasn’t a big deal. I was too exhausted for the annual retrospective and unwilling to unseal yet another autobiographical indictment. I released myself.

It is a trait common among my people — and I certainly share it — that no matter how much good we do, it never feels as though we’ve done enough. I am lucky at the moment to feel merely inadequate, merely lazy and hypocritical and complacent about my own contributions to the world, but I have known the crippling doubt, the desperate need to do more, that from time to time overburdens us all. We may be thoroughly inept at persuading ourselves that we’ve managed to eke out an existence that may not balance the scales but at least doesn’t tip them too far in the wrong direction, but we do a better job of persuading each other of this. I think we’re all pretty good at helping each other carry these failures; call it relentless kindness, radical forgiveness, grace, or simply the fatigue of knowing after endless search that there is nothing else to offer but ourselves.

In moments of self-judgment I crave those reassurances but at the same time I have an insatiable appetite for the judgment itself. It feels cleansing to acknowledge how far below my standards I fall. Having expectations doesn’t count unless I’m gritting my teeth and struggling to meet them. Who better to evaluate how I’m doing than the one who spends all the time inside my head? My people are well-meaning but not omniscient. I trust them because they refrain from platitudes and their sentiments are unvarnished, but what do they know about how fiercely or pathetically I have raged against the ills of the world? What does anyone else know about how well I’m living up to my potential? But then again, what do I?

Of course, once you introduce potential, the game is over. I am an incorrigible relativist, which means for me there is simultaneously always room for improvement and no hope of ever influencing the complex set of systems that govern our existence. Given either starting point, I can point the way to futility in alarmingly few moves. It doesn’t matter whether I’m meant to influence the system, guided by a divine hand or voices in my head or the flap of a mosquito’s wings in China. The system is the system either way, and we’re all standing under the same sky, eyeing the same dark cloud, and most of us never remember to bring an umbrella.

I’d say we should all give ourselves a break, but I know it doesn’t work that way. And sure, there’s something greater than the sum of our parts in the way people carry each other’s loads. Usually the only thing that keeps me from gorging on self-doubt is the energy it takes to huddle under a borrowed umbrella and patch the more egregious holes. The downpour drowns out all but the loudest truths. One of them is that the world is broken. Another is that it’s a gift to take care of each other. Next time it might be your turn to bring the umbrella.

Every two weeks some friends and I create new posts on the same topic. This week’s synchroblog posts — about hunger — are listed on our group blog, The Creative Collective. Please read them all.

]]> http://wordshepherd.com/2012/01/borrowing-umbrellas/feed/ 2 http://wordshepherd.com/2012/01/borrowing-umbrellas/ Good Intentions http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wordshepherd/~3/xBL42OG6iJs/ http://wordshepherd.com/2011/12/good-intentions/#comments Tue, 27 Dec 2011 13:52:19 +0000 David Mahaffey http://wordshepherd.com/?p=1007 I am no fan of promises, wary as I am of breaking the big ones,
and leery, too, of invoking my resolve for slight reassurances.
So your options are either to wade through my stuttering caveats
or to pay strict attention to the resolve my actions might imply.
What you thereby extract is no less tenuous than any other faith.

Maybe we can all aspire to certain unachievable goals, such as:
be relentlessly kind to ourselves (the hard part) and each other.
If the world really ends next year we won’t be put out for long.
And anyway the Mayan calendar hasn’t been as clear as it might’ve
regarding the potential for self-righteousness in the aftermath.

If that’s a little too “Thou Shalt,” let’s try something modest:
smile for the camera (especially if the lens cap is screwed on),
and I mean it, all the way through the flash and the fourth take,
really work those dimples, don’t hide those coffee-stained teeth,
offer up your unvarnished soul before they even try to steal it.

Every two weeks some friends and I create new posts on the same topic. This week’s synchroblog posts — about resolve — are listed on our group blog, The Creative Collective. Please read them all.

]]> I am no fan of promises, wary as I am of breaking the big ones,
and leery, too, of invoking my resolve for slight reassurances.
So your options are either to wade through my stuttering caveats
or to pay strict attention to the resolve my actions might imply.
What you thereby extract is no less tenuous than any other faith.

Maybe we can all aspire to certain unachievable goals, such as:
be relentlessly kind to ourselves (the hard part) and each other.
If the world really ends next year we won’t be put out for long.
And anyway the Mayan calendar hasn’t been as clear as it might’ve
regarding the potential for self-righteousness in the aftermath.

If that’s a little too “Thou Shalt,” let’s try something modest:
smile for the camera (especially if the lens cap is screwed on),
and I mean it, all the way through the flash and the fourth take,
really work those dimples, don’t hide those coffee-stained teeth,
offer up your unvarnished soul before they even try to steal it.

Every two weeks some friends and I create new posts on the same topic. This week’s synchroblog posts — about resolve — are listed on our group blog, The Creative Collective. Please read them all.

]]> http://wordshepherd.com/2011/12/good-intentions/feed/ 0 http://wordshepherd.com/2011/12/good-intentions/ The Web of Us http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wordshepherd/~3/QaZvsBEFopg/ http://wordshepherd.com/2011/12/the-web-of-us/#comments Tue, 13 Dec 2011 13:51:53 +0000 David Mahaffey http://wordshepherd.com/?p=1001 In 1996 I received in the mail two cassette tapes from a man I’d never met. One was a copy of John Prine’s Prime Prine, the other was Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks. The tapes were sent to me by Tom, who lived in Nashville, TN, and frequented the same country music discussion boards I did online. I knew that Tom was in his 50s, married, and in love with music. Tom knew that I was a kid in high school, just beginning to get frustrated with catchy songs that didn’t say anything. I played “Sam Stone” and didn’t know what to do; you can’t tap your toe to that quiet, plaintive testimony to the lingering and devastating consequences of war. Neither did I have an explanation for my father when he asked why I was listening to a man on the radio say Jesus Christ died for nothing. But I could hop online and write an e-mail to my friend Tom about the music he’d sent me and in that way begin a conversation about music that I continue today with my best friends, my family, and the occasional musician. This makes it hard for me to accept ill-informed dismissals of “the internet” as nothing more than a distraction that prevents genuine human connection.

I taught myself how to build websites by making one that helped the fans of a particular songwriter find each other. On the site I read stories about dead fathers, newborn children, weddings, love, and divorce. We helped each other track down copies of out-of-print CDs. We met at concerts. This was before Google, before Facebook. It was hard to find each other. It felt like a revelation when we did. We cared, deeply, about something that from the outside looks pretty silly. Like all communities, ours was a safe space to be unabashedly ourselves.

Earlier this year at a Rock Band party, one of the only songs I really knew was “Tangled Up In Blue,” from that same Bob Dylan album. I wouldn’t have known the song if it weren’t for AOL chat rooms and Yahoo! message boards. I wouldn’t have been invited to that party if it weren’t for Google Chat, which over the previous year had provided me the split second I needed to compose my thoughts during conversations with the friend who would eventually invite me to play Rock Band with him. Both of us were, I think, slightly mistrustful of humans (most of all ourselves), and with schedules that did not accommodate regular face-to-face interaction, we used the tools at hand to flash the appropriate secret handshakes, tease out the shibboleths of our tribe, and build a foundation upon which we could launch plans for global domination, or at least become friends. It is unlikely that I would have croaked out the Dylan song I learned as a teenager had I not been both comfortable with and fond of the people in that room. It’s a fair bet that every person there had used online interactions to deepen their relationships with me, if not with each other.

I started blogging in 2003 or so, as a way to keep in touch with far-flung friends and family while I was in graduate school in Boston. I didn’t have time to write letters to everyone I wanted to, and I thought that blogging would be a way to reach those who cared to read as well as a pretty selfless means of procrastination. Now I am Facebook friends with my large extended family, old friends from high school and college, and a sizable number of people I’ve never met. Some call it a waste of time, and it certainly can be that if we want it to be. But I know who’s getting married, whose cancer is in remission. I know who’s had a terrible day and needs to be invited out for a beer. And I know who will celebrate my happiness, support me through my failures, and on occasion reach out from Nashville, Tennessee or Paris, France to be a part of my life.

There are, certainly, a few sketchy characters amid the seekers of wonder and the wandering dreamers. I am free to keep them at a distance or to engage them just as I am offline, and when I choose the easier path I feel just as guilty for doing so. But for every person sharing hate and spreading rumors, there’s one sharing beautiful artwork (or cute cat pictures) and spreading links to writing that moved them. I’d rather not dismiss any of the above.

Every two weeks some friends and I create new posts on the same topic. This week’s synchroblog posts — about community — are listed on our group blog, The Creative Collective. Please read them all.

]]> In 1996 I received in the mail two cassette tapes from a man I’d never met. One was a copy of John Prine’s Prime Prine, the other was Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks. The tapes were sent to me by Tom, who lived in Nashville, TN, and frequented the same country music discussion boards I did online. I knew that Tom was in his 50s, married, and in love with music. Tom knew that I was a kid in high school, just beginning to get frustrated with catchy songs that didn’t say anything. I played “Sam Stone” and didn’t know what to do; you can’t tap your toe to that quiet, plaintive testimony to the lingering and devastating consequences of war. Neither did I have an explanation for my father when he asked why I was listening to a man on the radio say Jesus Christ died for nothing. But I could hop online and write an e-mail to my friend Tom about the music he’d sent me and in that way begin a conversation about music that I continue today with my best friends, my family, and the occasional musician. This makes it hard for me to accept ill-informed dismissals of “the internet” as nothing more than a distraction that prevents genuine human connection.

I taught myself how to build websites by making one that helped the fans of a particular songwriter find each other. On the site I read stories about dead fathers, newborn children, weddings, love, and divorce. We helped each other track down copies of out-of-print CDs. We met at concerts. This was before Google, before Facebook. It was hard to find each other. It felt like a revelation when we did. We cared, deeply, about something that from the outside looks pretty silly. Like all communities, ours was a safe space to be unabashedly ourselves.

Earlier this year at a Rock Band party, one of the only songs I really knew was “Tangled Up In Blue,” from that same Bob Dylan album. I wouldn’t have known the song if it weren’t for AOL chat rooms and Yahoo! message boards. I wouldn’t have been invited to that party if it weren’t for Google Chat, which over the previous year had provided me the split second I needed to compose my thoughts during conversations with the friend who would eventually invite me to play Rock Band with him. Both of us were, I think, slightly mistrustful of humans (most of all ourselves), and with schedules that did not accommodate regular face-to-face interaction, we used the tools at hand to flash the appropriate secret handshakes, tease out the shibboleths of our tribe, and build a foundation upon which we could launch plans for global domination, or at least become friends. It is unlikely that I would have croaked out the Dylan song I learned as a teenager had I not been both comfortable with and fond of the people in that room. It’s a fair bet that every person there had used online interactions to deepen their relationships with me, if not with each other.

I started blogging in 2003 or so, as a way to keep in touch with far-flung friends and family while I was in graduate school in Boston. I didn’t have time to write letters to everyone I wanted to, and I thought that blogging would be a way to reach those who cared to read as well as a pretty selfless means of procrastination. Now I am Facebook friends with my large extended family, old friends from high school and college, and a sizable number of people I’ve never met. Some call it a waste of time, and it certainly can be that if we want it to be. But I know who’s getting married, whose cancer is in remission. I know who’s had a terrible day and needs to be invited out for a beer. And I know who will celebrate my happiness, support me through my failures, and on occasion reach out from Nashville, Tennessee or Paris, France to be a part of my life.

There are, certainly, a few sketchy characters amid the seekers of wonder and the wandering dreamers. I am free to keep them at a distance or to engage them just as I am offline, and when I choose the easier path I feel just as guilty for doing so. But for every person sharing hate and spreading rumors, there’s one sharing beautiful artwork (or cute cat pictures) and spreading links to writing that moved them. I’d rather not dismiss any of the above.

Every two weeks some friends and I create new posts on the same topic. This week’s synchroblog posts — about community — are listed on our group blog, The Creative Collective. Please read them all.

]]> http://wordshepherd.com/2011/12/the-web-of-us/feed/ 1 http://wordshepherd.com/2011/12/the-web-of-us/ The Path He Laid http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wordshepherd/~3/C-X9JJwrdWs/ http://wordshepherd.com/2011/11/the-path-he-laid/#comments Tue, 29 Nov 2011 14:00:24 +0000 David Mahaffey http://wordshepherd.com/?p=993 My dad’s 60th birthday is this Saturday. He will probably rise at an unspeakable hour so he can squeeze in a little deer hunting before 7 AM, when he’s due to line up for the local Christmas parade. He and his friends have brewed up a mobile moonshine still, and they will wind their way through the hometown streets on the back of an old truck straight out of the 1930s. I would suggest that they’ll appear “in costume” with hillbilly hats and threadbare overalls, but my suspicion is that the attire is just normal Saturday dress for these gents. Even if that’s true, I’m pretty sure none of them can resist playing it up a little. They know where they’re from, they know what the world thinks of their heritage, and they’re better positioned to tweak that image than any carpetbagging yankee could ever hope to be.

Walkway.
Creative Commons License photo credit: Yiping Lim

There is in this display a lesson about how to acknowledge the less polished side of our roots without cutting them off completely. I have sometimes been too eager to distance myself from home, fearing that the poverty and attendant ignorance there would somehow trap me. Everyone who visits my hometown observes how beautiful the trees are, how lush the fields, how charming the cattle and the barns and the families who raise them. All that is true, but in the shadows we pass on our tours I see prejudice, I see the kinds of conviction that brook no debate, and I too often let those lamentable characteristics overshadow the praiseworthy. This is not a lesson that my father means to teach, but I have always been a watchful son. I have always taken more from his deeds than from his gruff edicts or patient explanations.

I’ll turn 33 next week myself. I still wonder what my absolute deadline is for growing up. I hope it’s not soon. I look at my dad and see how much ground I have yet to cover. On the good days I think I see the path he laid for me and I feel an echo of his kindness in myself. I try to remember to acknowledge my failings but to make light of them, not because they ought to be dismissed but because they’re a part of me and I need all the illumination I can get. Somewhere along the way, Dad stopped telling me what to do and started giving me advice. Sometimes I think it is a marvel that he knew when to make that switch. Probably, though, he was just waiting for me to start hearing him that way.

Every two weeks some friends and I create new posts on the same topic. This week’s synchroblog posts — about authority — are listed on our group blog, The Creative Collective. Please read them all.

]]> My dad’s 60th birthday is this Saturday. He will probably rise at an unspeakable hour so he can squeeze in a little deer hunting before 7 AM, when he’s due to line up for the local Christmas parade. He and his friends have brewed up a mobile moonshine still, and they will wind their way through the hometown streets on the back of an old truck straight out of the 1930s. I would suggest that they’ll appear “in costume” with hillbilly hats and threadbare overalls, but my suspicion is that the attire is just normal Saturday dress for these gents. Even if that’s true, I’m pretty sure none of them can resist playing it up a little. They know where they’re from, they know what the world thinks of their heritage, and they’re better positioned to tweak that image than any carpetbagging yankee could ever hope to be.

Walkway.
Creative Commons License photo credit: Yiping Lim

There is in this display a lesson about how to acknowledge the less polished side of our roots without cutting them off completely. I have sometimes been too eager to distance myself from home, fearing that the poverty and attendant ignorance there would somehow trap me. Everyone who visits my hometown observes how beautiful the trees are, how lush the fields, how charming the cattle and the barns and the families who raise them. All that is true, but in the shadows we pass on our tours I see prejudice, I see the kinds of conviction that brook no debate, and I too often let those lamentable characteristics overshadow the praiseworthy. This is not a lesson that my father means to teach, but I have always been a watchful son. I have always taken more from his deeds than from his gruff edicts or patient explanations.

I’ll turn 33 next week myself. I still wonder what my absolute deadline is for growing up. I hope it’s not soon. I look at my dad and see how much ground I have yet to cover. On the good days I think I see the path he laid for me and I feel an echo of his kindness in myself. I try to remember to acknowledge my failings but to make light of them, not because they ought to be dismissed but because they’re a part of me and I need all the illumination I can get. Somewhere along the way, Dad stopped telling me what to do and started giving me advice. Sometimes I think it is a marvel that he knew when to make that switch. Probably, though, he was just waiting for me to start hearing him that way.

Every two weeks some friends and I create new posts on the same topic. This week’s synchroblog posts — about authority — are listed on our group blog, The Creative Collective. Please read them all.

]]> http://wordshepherd.com/2011/11/the-path-he-laid/feed/ 1 http://wordshepherd.com/2011/11/the-path-he-laid/ The Physics of Sound http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wordshepherd/~3/VxrlQ9n_VYo/ http://wordshepherd.com/2011/11/the-physics-of-sound/#comments Tue, 15 Nov 2011 14:00:59 +0000 David Mahaffey http://wordshepherd.com/?p=982 Observations stolen and otherwise upon the viewing of these collages at Sun and Bone.

“It is important to note that suddenly, and against all probability, a sperm whale had been called into existence, several miles above the surface of an alien planet. But since this is not a naturally tenable position for a whale, this innocent creature had very little time to come to terms with its identity. This is what it thought as it fell: ‘Ahhh! Whoa! What’s happening? Who am I? Why am I here? What’s my purpose in life? What do I mean by ‘who am I’? Okay, okay, calm down, calm down, get a grip now. Ooh, this is an interesting sensation. What is it? It’s a sort of a tingling in my… well, I suppose I better start finding names for things. Let’s call it a… tail! Yeah! Tail! And hey, what’s this roaring sound, whooshing past what I’m suddenly gonna call my head? Wind! Is that a good name? It’ll do. Yeah, this is really exciting! I’m dizzy with anticipation! Or is it the wind? There’s an awful lot of that now, isn’t it? And what’s this thing coming toward me very fast? So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding name like ‘Ow’, ‘Ownge’, ‘Round’, ‘Ground’! That’s it! Ground! Ha! I wonder if it’ll be friends with me? Hello Ground!’”
~ Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

I bring up Douglas Adams because (not that one needs an excuse to quote The Guide) his whale’s exhilarated but short-lived existential crisis is the manic counterpoint to the still, vast sense of being suggested by Megan Jones’s whales. Her whales have, through luck or tragic mistake, bucked the force of gravity that provokes such whooshing self-examination in the heart of Mr. Adams’s newly sprung whale. Absent this urgent impetus, the Jones whales have become scholars, pondering not an insistent and oncoming ground but the cosmic expanse between the earth and the moon. These cetaceous astronauts seem to me inquisitive but at peace, brought closer to the lunar surface via a propulsive mystery they needn’t explain to the likes of us. We’d likely fail to grasp the physics of the journey anyway, as we fail to grasp the unnameable beauty of whatever it was they glimpsed, long ago, in the full moon’s reflection cast upon the water, the thing that loosed them from the deep. We have tried to play their sheet music in our finest concert halls, deaf to the tune. We have sunk the orchestra into our deepest trench and bid them play, to no avail. Composed in a vacuum, the song waited patient as a star, coasting frictionless toward some the nearest medium. We are the vibration. No wonder we can’t hear it.

Every two weeks some friends and I create new posts on the same topic. This week’s synchroblog posts — in response to someone else’s post as if our lives depend on it, are listed on our group blog, The Creative Collective. Please read them all.

]]> Observations stolen and otherwise upon the viewing of these collages at Sun and Bone.

“It is important to note that suddenly, and against all probability, a sperm whale had been called into existence, several miles above the surface of an alien planet. But since this is not a naturally tenable position for a whale, this innocent creature had very little time to come to terms with its identity. This is what it thought as it fell: ‘Ahhh! Whoa! What’s happening? Who am I? Why am I here? What’s my purpose in life? What do I mean by ‘who am I’? Okay, okay, calm down, calm down, get a grip now. Ooh, this is an interesting sensation. What is it? It’s a sort of a tingling in my… well, I suppose I better start finding names for things. Let’s call it a… tail! Yeah! Tail! And hey, what’s this roaring sound, whooshing past what I’m suddenly gonna call my head? Wind! Is that a good name? It’ll do. Yeah, this is really exciting! I’m dizzy with anticipation! Or is it the wind? There’s an awful lot of that now, isn’t it? And what’s this thing coming toward me very fast? So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding name like ‘Ow’, ‘Ownge’, ‘Round’, ‘Ground’! That’s it! Ground! Ha! I wonder if it’ll be friends with me? Hello Ground!’”
~ Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

I bring up Douglas Adams because (not that one needs an excuse to quote The Guide) his whale’s exhilarated but short-lived existential crisis is the manic counterpoint to the still, vast sense of being suggested by Megan Jones’s whales. Her whales have, through luck or tragic mistake, bucked the force of gravity that provokes such whooshing self-examination in the heart of Mr. Adams’s newly sprung whale. Absent this urgent impetus, the Jones whales have become scholars, pondering not an insistent and oncoming ground but the cosmic expanse between the earth and the moon. These cetaceous astronauts seem to me inquisitive but at peace, brought closer to the lunar surface via a propulsive mystery they needn’t explain to the likes of us. We’d likely fail to grasp the physics of the journey anyway, as we fail to grasp the unnameable beauty of whatever it was they glimpsed, long ago, in the full moon’s reflection cast upon the water, the thing that loosed them from the deep. We have tried to play their sheet music in our finest concert halls, deaf to the tune. We have sunk the orchestra into our deepest trench and bid them play, to no avail. Composed in a vacuum, the song waited patient as a star, coasting frictionless toward some the nearest medium. We are the vibration. No wonder we can’t hear it.

Every two weeks some friends and I create new posts on the same topic. This week’s synchroblog posts — in response to someone else’s post as if our lives depend on it, are listed on our group blog, The Creative Collective. Please read them all.

]]> http://wordshepherd.com/2011/11/the-physics-of-sound/feed/ 0 http://wordshepherd.com/2011/11/the-physics-of-sound/ A Body of Water http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wordshepherd/~3/c0P55bHE2FY/ http://wordshepherd.com/2011/11/a-body-of-water/#comments Tue, 01 Nov 2011 13:00:20 +0000 David Mahaffey http://wordshepherd.com/?p=946 If you’re asked whether you’d rather be a river or an ocean, do not answer.
We are all mostly sponges, mostly rapids, mostly murky, unplumbed depths.
I was quick to name one restless, the other relentless, but which was which
I don’t remember — babble and surf alike have eroded that buoyant conviction.

Even if springs helped carve the ridge, the changed rock still yearns for the sky,
weeping from crevice to crevice ’til every drop pools, spent, beneath the face of
gravity, the helpless god who casts them down no matter how they cling, and,
knowing what they have lost, rushes the fallen to commiserate with the sea.

But there’s no consoling an ocean full of mountains it never meant to swallow
when every violent, futile heave throws not the rock but a lapping wave ashore.
In some corners of this cold, unmapped abyss wait the salt bones who made us,
struggling to recall whether they were meant to be a clog in the drain or a plug.

If I must be a body of water, I’m partial to this one, whose aching bones I know.
The crow’s nest is a tangle of raised eyebrows, but the vessel feels seaworthy.
I’ll bail to keep this clever husk dry, pilot by the stars when the compass fails,
and try to fathom, feeble instrument that I am, how fast the water line’s receding.

Every two weeks some friends and I create new posts on the same topic. This week’s synchroblog posts about “Water” are listed on our group blog, The Creative Collective. Please read them.

]]> If you’re asked whether you’d rather be a river or an ocean, do not answer.
We are all mostly sponges, mostly rapids, mostly murky, unplumbed depths.
I was quick to name one restless, the other relentless, but which was which
I don’t remember — babble and surf alike have eroded that buoyant conviction.

Even if springs helped carve the ridge, the changed rock still yearns for the sky,
weeping from crevice to crevice ’til every drop pools, spent, beneath the face of
gravity, the helpless god who casts them down no matter how they cling, and,
knowing what they have lost, rushes the fallen to commiserate with the sea.

But there’s no consoling an ocean full of mountains it never meant to swallow
when every violent, futile heave throws not the rock but a lapping wave ashore.
In some corners of this cold, unmapped abyss wait the salt bones who made us,
struggling to recall whether they were meant to be a clog in the drain or a plug.

If I must be a body of water, I’m partial to this one, whose aching bones I know.
The crow’s nest is a tangle of raised eyebrows, but the vessel feels seaworthy.
I’ll bail to keep this clever husk dry, pilot by the stars when the compass fails,
and try to fathom, feeble instrument that I am, how fast the water line’s receding.

Every two weeks some friends and I create new posts on the same topic. This week’s synchroblog posts about “Water” are listed on our group blog, The Creative Collective. Please read them.

]]> http://wordshepherd.com/2011/11/a-body-of-water/feed/ 7 http://wordshepherd.com/2011/11/a-body-of-water/ Containing Multitudes, Part 3 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wordshepherd/~3/hw9Gh-4GaoU/ http://wordshepherd.com/2011/10/containing-multitudes-part-3/#comments Tue, 18 Oct 2011 13:00:04 +0000 David Mahaffey http://wordshepherd.com/?p=934

Previously on Containing Multitudes: Part 1 | Part 2

It turns out that the people who read my blog don’t like it when I say that I don’t write. It is a reflex, guys, and I’m sorry about it. Even as the denial passes my lips I know it isn’t true, and I have been caught in the lie so many times lately I now find myself hastening to retract the statement before someone else does.

I think I long ago persuaded myself that real writers rise at dawn without fail for their daily rendezvous with whatever muse comes calling, but the truth is, all the ones I know hit the snooze button at least twice and count 45 minutes of Facebooking as part of their daily hour at the keyboard. And hey, so do I. My laptop battery just died because I spent two hours not really writing this post.

It’s hard to think of all the internalization and staring out of windows as the work of writing, since I do not possess the attendant world-building gusto that so many writers seem able to produce after extended navel gazing. The idea that I could sit down, start spinning a tale, and discover what happens next is alien to me. If I sit down without an outline, the only thing that greets my key-tapping is the desolate cursor. I’ve spent so much time staring at the tall, thin, blinking gentleman that I’ve come to think of him as an undertaker: patient, inexorable, and at least a little inclined to dispose of that which I invite onto the page.

Somehow this blogging enterprise is different. The only characters I have to sketch are myself and the other poor souls I attempt to render, and every two weeks I have the convenient excuses of a regular deadline and an imposed theme. Nobody seems to mind if I blather here; the worst that can happen is that someone leaves without commenting. The stakes feel low, so this writing doesn’t “count,” right? That, at least, is how I persuade myself to post most of these entries despite an unshakeable conviction that they aren’t as polished as they ought to be.

I most recently caught that reflexive disavowal of my writing self at work, twice in one week. First, my boss added a link to his new blog from his staff bio, and since he sometimes reads my stuff, he asked if I was going to do the same. The thought of directing my coworkers or the occasional curious magazine reader to this blog was not pleasing, so I offered an emphatic “Nooooo” and hoped I wouldn’t be pressed on the subject.

A few days later, my boss suggested that it might be possible for me interview anyone I’d be interested in speaking with. Again, without hesitation, I made it clear that I was in no way inclined to do that. I mean, who wants to meet someone he respects and offer them a chance to talk about the things that are important to them? Oh, right. Me.

I have developed a trick, a way of working around those moments of reflexive self-sabotage: any time I feel that impulse, I immediately tell someone else about the thing I just declined. It usually takes about 30 seconds for them to insist that I change my tune, and another year or so for me to get around to actually doing so. But it works.

This post is me doing that, too. Here are some things I am alleged to be working on:

  • The rest of the story I began a couple months ago about the strange blue light in the mountains
  • A story long promised called “Bone Fire,” about an orbital crematorium
  • Anything else I may have mentioned in passing and promptly forgotten about. Remind me.

Every two weeks some friends and I create new posts on the same topic. This week’s synchroblog posts about “Identity Crisis” are listed on our group blog, The Creative Col lective. Please read them.

]]>

Previously on Containing Multitudes: Part 1 | Part 2

It turns out that the people who read my blog don’t like it when I say that I don’t write. It is a reflex, guys, and I’m sorry about it. Even as the denial passes my lips I know it isn’t true, and I have been caught in the lie so many times lately I now find myself hastening to retract the statement before someone else does.

I think I long ago persuaded myself that real writers rise at dawn without fail for their daily rendezvous with whatever muse comes calling, but the truth is, all the ones I know hit the snooze button at least twice and count 45 minutes of Facebooking as part of their daily hour at the keyboard. And hey, so do I. My laptop battery just died because I spent two hours not really writing this post.

It’s hard to think of all the internalization and staring out of windows as the work of writing, since I do not possess the attendant world-building gusto that so many writers seem able to produce after extended navel gazing. The idea that I could sit down, start spinning a tale, and discover what happens next is alien to me. If I sit down without an outline, the only thing that greets my key-tapping is the desolate cursor. I’ve spent so much time staring at the tall, thin, blinking gentleman that I’ve come to think of him as an undertaker: patient, inexorable, and at least a little inclined to dispose of that which I invite onto the page.

Somehow this blogging enterprise is different. The only characters I have to sketch are myself and the other poor souls I attempt to render, and every two weeks I have the convenient excuses of a regular deadline and an imposed theme. Nobody seems to mind if I blather here; the worst that can happen is that someone leaves without commenting. The stakes feel low, so this writing doesn’t “count,” right? That, at least, is how I persuade myself to post most of these entries despite an unshakeable conviction that they aren’t as polished as they ought to be.

I most recently caught that reflexive disavowal of my writing self at work, twice in one week. First, my boss added a link to his new blog from his staff bio, and since he sometimes reads my stuff, he asked if I was going to do the same. The thought of directing my coworkers or the occasional curious magazine reader to this blog was not pleasing, so I offered an emphatic “Nooooo” and hoped I wouldn’t be pressed on the subject.

A few days later, my boss suggested that it might be possible for me interview anyone I’d be interested in speaking with. Again, without hesitation, I made it clear that I was in no way inclined to do that. I mean, who wants to meet someone he respects and offer them a chance to talk about the things that are important to them? Oh, right. Me.

I have developed a trick, a way of working around those moments of reflexive self-sabotage: any time I feel that impulse, I immediately tell someone else about the thing I just declined. It usually takes about 30 seconds for them to insist that I change my tune, and another year or so for me to get around to actually doing so. But it works.

This post is me doing that, too. Here are some things I am alleged to be working on:

  • The rest of the story I began a couple months ago about the strange blue light in the mountains
  • A story long promised called “Bone Fire,” about an orbital crematorium
  • Anything else I may have mentioned in passing and promptly forgotten about. Remind me.

Every two weeks some friends and I create new posts on the same topic. This week’s synchroblog posts about “Identity Crisis” are listed on our group blog, The Creative Col lective. Please read them.

]]> http://wordshepherd.com/2011/10/containing-multitudes-part-3/feed/ 1 http://wordshepherd.com/2011/10/containing-multitudes-part-3/ Midnight Desolation http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wordshepherd/~3/X3SDzG1q2nE/ http://wordshepherd.com/2011/09/midnight-desolation/#comments Tue, 20 Sep 2011 13:00:57 +0000 David Mahaffey http://wordshepherd.com/?p=902

When I chose to live, there was no joy — it’s just a line I crossed. ~Dar Williams, “After All”

If there’s a more enchanting place on this pale blue dot than the Blue Ridge Parkway, I haven’t been there, and I’m not sure I’m equipped to appreciate it if I go. When you climb above the clouds and look down on a sea of trees bristling under the wind’s caress, it’s not hard to persuade yourself that if you stood on your tiptoes and raised up your arms you might float out over the mountains, graceful as a kite. Up there, you can see more than just the shape of the earth, the next town over, the patient work of water cutting through rock. Up there, you get an up-close view of yourself. Sometimes it isn’t pretty.

For some reason, after I graduated with a degree in creative writing from a liberal-arts college in a tourist town, I had trouble finding meaningful work. It’s probably just as well that I wasn’t getting paid to write, because my last year of college workshops had burned my sputtering little candle down to nothing. I was working in publishing…until the academic press where I packaged books went down in a controversy so ignominious the entire staff walked out. My office job was pleasant…except when my boss would go on shouty and unfounded rants about my productivity. The animal shelter hired me after I’d been volunteering to socialize dogs for a few months…and then they asked me to help euthanize a bag of kittens. Many things can and ought to be measured by the bag. Kittens, no.

I offer the above as if it’s a rationale for why I got depressed, but that’s not quite how depression works. Stress likely exacerbated my fall into full-time sadface, but the brain-chemistry cocktail that led me into counseling and antidepressants was probably brewing long before I entered the real world. Also, it turns out working three jobs is a good way to never get any exercise, not to mention a good way to never see your partner, your pets, or your friends.

I recognized depression. I’d seen plenty of it in college. It ran through the brains of my family, though like most things it’s not something we’d talked about. I sought refuge in the dark where I always found it: on a parkway overlook. This, conveniently, was also exercise, and stress relief, and a quiet space to try to think my way out of the fatalistic spirals that sometimes overtook me. This was all familiar territory.

Driving through the silent black, speeding around blind curves, climbing higher and seeking midnight desolation, I became acquainted with an exhilarating new urge: I wanted to pitch my truck off a cliff, to observe first-hand that peaceful floating sensation for an instant before the fast-forward impact I knew would come. The first few times that thought entered my head, I chalked it up to overspill from the raging Johnny Cash pouring from the speakers. Before long the notion of falling off a cliff didn’t seem so alien.

Years later, someone else I know drove up to the parkway to say goodbye to the world, but in the end chose to live. It is, another good friend observed, an ideal spot for talking yourself out of dying.

There’s a moment when the idea of suicide stops being scary, and I’m told that’s when you’re really in need of help. After I got over the taboo, I thought of it as an odd fancy — anyone who knows me knows I delight in steering any notion toward its most broken (and inevitable) endpoint. I only dwelt in the space between unusual fantasy and terrifyingly real alternative for a few midnight rides before I reclaimed enough shreds of my sanity to go talk to someone about it.

There was no revelation, no grand resolve to think positive or seize the day. It was just a choice to fall into another day, and another, and eventually the meds took hold, I left town for grad school, I lived. That’s not always how it works, but I was lucky. Somewhere along the way the falling came to feel like floating again.

Every two weeks some friends and I cre­ate new posts on the same topic. This week’s syn­chroblog posts about “Falling” are listed on our group blog, The Cre­ative Col­lec­tive. Please read them.

]]>

When I chose to live, there was no joy — it’s just a line I crossed. ~Dar Williams, “After All”

If there’s a more enchanting place on this pale blue dot than the Blue Ridge Parkway, I haven’t been there, and I’m not sure I’m equipped to appreciate it if I go. When you climb above the clouds and look down on a sea of trees bristling under the wind’s caress, it’s not hard to persuade yourself that if you stood on your tiptoes and raised up your arms you might float out over the mountains, graceful as a kite. Up there, you can see more than just the shape of the earth, the next town over, the patient work of water cutting through rock. Up there, you get an up-close view of yourself. Sometimes it isn’t pretty.

For some reason, after I graduated with a degree in creative writing from a liberal-arts college in a tourist town, I had trouble finding meaningful work. It’s probably just as well that I wasn’t getting paid to write, because my last year of college workshops had burned my sputtering little candle down to nothing. I was working in publishing…until the academic press where I packaged books went down in a controversy so ignominious the entire staff walked out. My office job was pleasant…except when my boss would go on shouty and unfounded rants about my productivity. The animal shelter hired me after I’d been volunteering to socialize dogs for a few months…and then they asked me to help euthanize a bag of kittens. Many things can and ought to be measured by the bag. Kittens, no.

I offer the above as if it’s a rationale for why I got depressed, but that’s not quite how depression works. Stress likely exacerbated my fall into full-time sadface, but the brain-chemistry cocktail that led me into counseling and antidepressants was probably brewing long before I entered the real world. Also, it turns out working three jobs is a good way to never get any exercise, not to mention a good way to never see your partner, your pets, or your friends.

I recognized depression. I’d seen plenty of it in college. It ran through the brains of my family, though like most things it’s not something we’d talked about. I sought refuge in the dark where I always found it: on a parkway overlook. This, conveniently, was also exercise, and stress relief, and a quiet space to try to think my way out of the fatalistic spirals that sometimes overtook me. This was all familiar territory.

Driving through the silent black, speeding around blind curves, climbing higher and seeking midnight desolation, I became acquainted with an exhilarating new urge: I wanted to pitch my truck off a cliff, to observe first-hand that peaceful floating sensation for an instant before the fast-forward impact I knew would come. The first few times that thought entered my head, I chalked it up to overspill from the raging Johnny Cash pouring from the speakers. Before long the notion of falling off a cliff didn’t seem so alien.

Years later, someone else I know drove up to the parkway to say goodbye to the world, but in the end chose to live. It is, another good friend observed, an ideal spot for talking yourself out of dying.

There’s a moment when the idea of suicide stops being scary, and I’m told that’s when you’re really in need of help. After I got over the taboo, I thought of it as an odd fancy — anyone who knows me knows I delight in steering any notion toward its most broken (and inevitable) endpoint. I only dwelt in the space between unusual fantasy and terrifyingly real alternative for a few midnight rides before I reclaimed enough shreds of my sanity to go talk to someone about it.

There was no revelation, no grand resolve to think positive or seize the day. It was just a choice to fall into another day, and another, and eventually the meds took hold, I left town for grad school, I lived. That’s not always how it works, but I was lucky. Somewhere along the way the falling came to feel like floating again.

Every two weeks some friends and I cre­ate new posts on the same topic. This week’s syn­chroblog posts about “Falling” are listed on our group blog, The Cre­ative Col­lec­tive. Please read them.

]]> http://wordshepherd.com/2011/09/midnight-desolation/feed/ 2 http://wordshepherd.com/2011/09/midnight-desolation/ His Most Astonished Drawl http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wordshepherd/~3/r32mxpcceCs/ http://wordshepherd.com/2011/09/his-most-astonished-drawl/#comments Tue, 06 Sep 2011 13:00:30 +0000 David Mahaffey http://wordshepherd.com/?p=878

then the day shone bright and rounder ’til the one turned into two
and the two into ten thousand things, and old things into new
and on some virgin beach head one lonesome critter crawled
and he looked about and shouted out in his most astonished drawl
this is my home, this is my only home
this is the only sacred ground that I have ever known
~ Dave Carter & Tracy Grammer, “Gentle Arms of Eden“

In the Carolina foothills words sit thick in the jaw. Vowels are long and flat, consonants rough, syllables sometimes inferred rather than enunciated. We shed our words slow, sometimes reconsidering them even as they slip from our lips. When I tell people I grew up in the rural South, one of the first things they ask is where my accent has gone.

I can’t remember making a conscious decision to give it up, but I did note in high school that most of my teachers had less of a drawl than their students. This coincided with the height of Jeff Foxworthy’s redneck joke popularity, and between wanting to mimic my teachers and wanting to avoid association with Foxworthy’s buffoon caricatures, it’s easy enough to see how the seeds of a more neutral diction might have been planted.

Most of the people I met in college happened to be from elsewhere: Ohio, Florida, California, London. Not even the guy from Alabama, though, had a pronounced drawl. I spent a year using words I’d never used with people whose accents were influenced more by their televisions than by the Appalachian Mountains. I visited my family less and less as the year wore on, thanks to homework and a growing college community, so I didn’t realize just how much I’d polished the way I spoke until my first summer back.

I must’ve said something pretentious, because my snarky preteen cousin, always quick to take anyone who needed it down a peg, accused me of bringing home a “college accent.” That summer was already not my favorite. I felt hemmed in by the much smaller world accessible to me from my hometown (conveniently overlooking the vibrant community I could have tried harder to be a part of). But I also felt self-conscious about what had by then become a more deliberate rejection of the culture I’d grown up in. I worried that most of my family would read any fundamental differences of opinion as an attack, and I didn’t want to make them defensive.

There is an argument to be made (even Jeff Foxworthy has made it) that by choosing to say reasonably articulate things without my Southern drawl I make it easier to stereotype those whose voices twang. It is selfish of me to abdicate my accent in an attempt to more easily gain acceptance from other articulate people. I used to cringe at the thought of someone mentally deducting several IQ points whenever they heard me speak, but it’s many years since I needed that buffer.

Where’s my accent? When someone asks that inevitable question, I can turn it on, a charming enough parlor trick for an erstwhile Southern man. If I spend a little time talking with my family, an echo drawl lingers in my throat for a few hours or a few days, but eventually it fades again from my conversations. There are now only hints of it at the extremes: it’ll whisper to you when I’m very tired, very angry, or very, very drunk. I didn’t mean to give up my drawl, but having lost it, it now feels alien on my tongue.

Every two weeks some friends and I cre­ate new posts on the same topic. This week’s syn­chroblog posts about “Giving Up for the Long Haul” are listed on our group blog, The Cre­ative Col­lec­tive. Please read them.

]]>

then the day shone bright and rounder ’til the one turned into two
and the two into ten thousand things, and old things into new
and on some virgin beach head one lonesome critter crawled
and he looked about and shouted out in his most astonished drawl
this is my home, this is my only home
this is the only sacred ground that I have ever known
~ Dave Carter & Tracy Grammer, “Gentle Arms of Eden“

In the Carolina foothills words sit thick in the jaw. Vowels are long and flat, consonants rough, syllables sometimes inferred rather than enunciated. We shed our words slow, sometimes reconsidering them even as they slip from our lips. When I tell people I grew up in the rural South, one of the first things they ask is where my accent has gone.

I can’t remember making a conscious decision to give it up, but I did note in high school that most of my teachers had less of a drawl than their students. This coincided with the height of Jeff Foxworthy’s redneck joke popularity, and between wanting to mimic my teachers and wanting to avoid association with Foxworthy’s buffoon caricatures, it’s easy enough to see how the seeds of a more neutral diction might have been planted.

Most of the people I met in college happened to be from elsewhere: Ohio, Florida, California, London. Not even the guy from Alabama, though, had a pronounced drawl. I spent a year using words I’d never used with people whose accents were influenced more by their televisions than by the Appalachian Mountains. I visited my family less and less as the year wore on, thanks to homework and a growing college community, so I didn’t realize just how much I’d polished the way I spoke until my first summer back.

I must’ve said something pretentious, because my snarky preteen cousin, always quick to take anyone who needed it down a peg, accused me of bringing home a “college accent.” That summer was already not my favorite. I felt hemmed in by the much smaller world accessible to me from my hometown (conveniently overlooking the vibrant community I could have tried harder to be a part of). But I also felt self-conscious about what had by then become a more deliberate rejection of the culture I’d grown up in. I worried that most of my family would read any fundamental differences of opinion as an attack, and I didn’t want to make them defensive.

There is an argument to be made (even Jeff Foxworthy has made it) that by choosing to say reasonably articulate things without my Southern drawl I make it easier to stereotype those whose voices twang. It is selfish of me to abdicate my accent in an attempt to more easily gain acceptance from other articulate people. I used to cringe at the thought of someone mentally deducting several IQ points whenever they heard me speak, but it’s many years since I needed that buffer.

Where’s my accent? When someone asks that inevitable question, I can turn it on, a charming enough parlor trick for an erstwhile Southern man. If I spend a little time talking with my family, an echo drawl lingers in my throat for a few hours or a few days, but eventually it fades again from my conversations. There are now only hints of it at the extremes: it’ll whisper to you when I’m very tired, very angry, or very, very drunk. I didn’t mean to give up my drawl, but having lost it, it now feels alien on my tongue.

Every two weeks some friends and I cre­ate new posts on the same topic. This week’s syn­chroblog posts about “Giving Up for the Long Haul” are listed on our group blog, The Cre­ative Col­lec­tive. Please read them.

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