Random Musings

Sometimes I find myself wondering just what it is that makes words flow at certain times and then be jammed up inside at others. I find myself wondering if everyone who ever wrote felt that way.
I know that I write best at night when the house is quiet and everyone is snuggled in for the night, but that wasn’t always the case. When I was in Europe, I wrote best in the wee hours of the morning before the sun rose. I half wonder if there is a specific time clock that my muse pays attention to… you know if she is on GMT -2 or what have you. I know that she choses the most inconvient times to be prolific for someone living in EST.
Part of me doesn’t mind, but then there is the part of me that knows I have to function during the day because it is what the outside world expects.

I had started this post (Feb,2008)when I was still a long way from home. I am now home, but I am not quite where I want to be. Yes, I want to be home, but home when it feels empty in the house is never fun. Things are very scattered right now as I am trying to rebuild in the post apocolyptic world of a not so amicable divorce.

Yes, that does mean that I am once again Jodi Parker, and will be once again writing under the same name that many of my works were originally penned under.

It had been a long road and has taken a long time to get back to being me. I have much to correct over the next few months as most of my site work was done under my married name and that name needs to be removed at that person no longer exists.

It will be a slow process as there is only so much one can do when one has as much on their plate as I do at this time.

Bear with me, I will get back into the swing of things.

When the muse talks, I will better be able to respond now that the boat is turned around and following the river and the hole in the hull are being patched up a little more each day.

Have you ever wondered why you act one way or another when a certain topic is brought up? In a nutshell… Old Wounds.

You have no doubt heard that an artist is their own harshest critic. I know the sentiment intimately. I am my own harshest critic. Poems I have written I have seen as little more than a few words I have strung together, not worth anything.

I put up the site Flowing-Pen as a ruse. It was not truthfully put together for the sake of sharing my words, but actually as a way to prove to those who said I was a good writer, just how wrong they really were. Yes, that would be the cynic in me.

I was told by some that my writings were not good. I was young at the time, and I guess that is a folly of youth to believe such things when we are told them. In retrospect it was not that I was not good, just that I was not giving them what they expected.

I am not the best technical writer on the block, far from it. I am a Poet. I am a creative writer. I am a playwrite. Hell, my literary idols are mostly poets… the likes of William Shakespeare, Robert Frost, Ogden Nash, Robert Burns… and some others but I am not willing to go through the long list now, would be my luck I would forget someone. When it comes to prose J.R.R. Tolkein, Piers Anthony, Alan Dean Foster… all would be definitely among that list. But they are not the only ones who ply a craft that I admire, they are just some of the ones that inspired me.

It is funny, it has taken me reading things like Piers Anthony’s Bio of an Ogre for me to realize that I may not be a bad a writer as I thought. Some of the ones who have told me that my poetry or works are good may actually be right. Scary thought that.

I guess one of my friends could be classed as my biggest fan. I try not to think about that much as if I did I would probably want to find someplace and hide. He told me recently that he has been telling people about my site, about my poetry, my words. What stops me from hiding is I know I can trust him. I know the lengths he has gone to in order to ensure that others don’t try and claim my works as theirs.

I was told once when and how my friend first came across my poetry. I was both honored and scared. Instead of seeing it as a phenominal honor someone even more cynical then myself told me that it was wrong for the person to have exposed people to my works in that manner without some monetary compensation for using my works.

I am torn about that to be honest. Granted, I should be paid for my works, but are schools to be exempted from some things and not from others? But this is not about that is it?

This is about being a Poet at heart and being cynical about one’s work, though I am not sure cynical is quite the right term for the way I am about it.

Hypercritical is probably a better term. In a way I had to become that way with my own work. I had to do that because if I didn’t I would inadvertantly misspell words. I still do sometimes, but they would be far more rampant than they are now.

I am that way when I perform on stage, which is probably why my own father didn’t remember that it was me he cast in a role in the spring production at my high school during my senior year. He told me some years later that it was not me on that stage, but the character I was playing. Before he said that I was in tears because my father could remember everyone else he cast in every roll in all three plays we did that night, but couldn’t remember who played the Bellboy in “The Still Alarm”. If you knew what I looked like in High School you would know what a feat that was to make me look like a shapeless boy with short hair in that play.

When it comes to my poetry, what is on the site is no where near the poetry I have written. It is not even a small portion of what I have written over the years, though it is some of my better pieces and most of them have been published elsewhere and are appearing on my site after the copyright has reverted yet again to me.

It was not until I had someone point out to me that I talk in metaphors and create vivid imagery with my words and speach that I realized I was a poet at heart. It is kinda a shame to come to your calling when you are young, walk away from it for not seeing it before you only to return to it half way through what most would consider your life. But that is, in all honesty, what has happened to me.

So what do I intend to do about it?

For one thing I will be adding a Guestbook to the next incarnation of Flowing-pen. For another, I will be reassessing what works are viewable through the site. Some of my views on writing will remain, some will be removed to be included in other projects.

This transformation has already started and should be completed by my next birthday. For those who know me or know someone who knows me, you probably know when that is already. For those who happened to stumble across the site by some sheer accident as you intended to type in some other domain, I could give you a hint, but that would be telling wouldn’t it?

Keep checking back for the updates and for updates on the progress… Until then, Merry Part.

I can’t say why I feel that way, but to be honest the more I find out about how my words have touched the lives of others the more terrified I become.

It is not that I don’t want to know that my words have touched others, it is more that I have trouble getting my mind around how far my words have reached. I guess there was a time before the age of computers where one’s words were little more than a ripple in a pond. In a way, I am a part of the generation that straddles the chasm between the generation that predated computers in every home and the one that has a network in every home that has a computer.

This is the “Age of Information” and for good or bad everything that we write down on a computer can be transmitted to hundreds and hundreds of other computers world wide. This creates a double edged sword for most people.

There are those that assume that if a blog is set up so as to share ones thoughts with a few close friends that the contents of said blog (web log – a diary or journal on line) is public domain and that anyone with an intrest in what is said behind closed doors should be permitted access it. They don’t see that such a blog is a private conversation of sorts among a few trusted friends.

There are those who assume that if you have a journal or blog on line at all, that you must want others to read it, as well if you didn’t, by their reckoning, you wouldn’t have a journal on the internet.

Then there are those who respect boundaries. Those who somewhere in their upbrining were taught right from wrong. Those who somewhere in their past learned the difference between Morals and Murals. Those who somewhere in their past learned the difference between Scrupples and Rubles. It is these people that are often in the trusted circles of others web logs and don’t bother to read the entries unless they are specifically told that an entry is likely to be of interest to them.

But it is not just weblogs that are accessed without permission, shoot some people think that is it ok for people to access routers, webhosts and other secure areas and manipulate the information. These people are the bullies of the internet. They think that it is fun to tear down that which took hours or even days or or even weeks or even months or even years to painstakingly create and modify to a smooth running site.

It is these Murals and Rubles people that would intentionally destroy the joy that the artist took in creating such a site. Unfortunately we don’t always know who these people are until we have let them into our inner circles and once there they are often too hard to get rid of.

But this post was never supposed to be about them. It is about what terrifies me. Yes, people who would destroy that which I have worked for so long and hard on, by basing their site on the ideas used in my sites and then claim the ideas as theirs or by hacking my sites to alter the information to make it appear as though I am the upstart. I fear the effect my words have on people… I would hope that they move people to do good and right, but one never knows when one puts their works to the public.

As Georgia O’Keefe once said… “I paint for me, what you get from my paintings is for you.” There is no more eloquent way to put an Artist’s intentions. I write for me… What you get from my writings, though the thought does terrify me… is all you.

The first time I saw the Movie Sabrina with Harrison Ford in the role of Linus, about fell out when the character was described as “the world’s only living heart donor. He thinks that morals are paintings on walls and scruples are money in Russia.”

Why did I find this so funny? Well I guess you could say I have run across a few people in my life that quote could be applied to. I am not saying I have met many, but there are a few people whose paths I have crossed or whose paths have crossed mine that could easily be classified as one of the world’s few living heart donors. There are many whom I have met that would not know the difference between a moral and a mural… or rubles and scruples. What do you do when you meet people like this? Give them a wide berth usually, but never turn your back on them as they often “keep their friends close and their enemies closer” and would stab either in the back just as soon as look at them.

When you think of heart donors in the literal sense, they are beyond the ability to care about others as they don’t breath and they are often brain dead, harsh as that may sound. Living heart donors are often so focused and self centered on what they need or want that they do not care about others. It would not matter the happiness they would deny others as no one has the right to be happy unless they are and often times they are never happy.

I have known a few “Living Heart Donors” to feign happiness to convince the outside world that they are not as miserable as they truly are. They do this for one reason and one reason only, to dupe others into believing that they have the capacity to care what someone else might think or feel.

The question is… Do “Living Heart Donors” have the ability to care about others? I would like to hope so, but I don’t think so.

A “Murals and Rubles” person would either not know right from wrong or if they are one of the “Living Heart Donors” they simply wouldn’t care.

I am sure there are some who would class me in with this crowd, but hey who among us doesn’t have a few that truly see us as the devil incarnate as we threaten by our very existance what they believe is true and right?

The “Murals and Rubles” person is most likely to be the one that is a habitual scoundral. The roustabout that is always looking for the good in others just so that they can exploit it. They exploit without on moment’s remorse, without a second thought of the damage they cause in taking advantage of those around them. For these people it is all about personal gain, status, the extra notch on their belt that says they did it first.

What about doing it right? What about doing what is best for those involved in the situation? They can’t bring themselves to think about that as it would mean questioning their other motives. No one likes to have their motives questioned and the dislike is only compounded when they feel compelled to question their own motives.

Someone once asked me if I had had a certain person in mind when I wrote a given piece of work. Instead of answering, I went quiet. In truth, yes, often times I have at least one person in mind when I write about something, though often it is more than one person that I have in mind.

Do I sometimes see those traits that I am illuminating in myself as I write? Yes, I will invariably find something in the piece that rings true even to myself and I will end up trying to figure out how to change and be a better person for it. Does it always work? Nope, after all nobody is perfect.

Think about it for a minute, can someone describe you as… “the world’s only living heart donor. He thinks that morals are paintings on walls and scruples are money in Russia.” If so, are you going to try a little harder to be more compassionate and forth right in your dealings?